


Gold Plated

by Blame Canada (OneHitWondersAnonymous)



Category: South Park
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), But Backwards, Creek is Endgame, Developing Relationship, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, Dubiously Consensual Blow Jobs, Explicit Sexual Content, Face-Fucking, Falling In Love, Feelings Realization, High School, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Introspection, M/M, Mentioned Twenny, Minor Crenny, Or is it..?, Recovery, Self-Destruction, Spitroasting, Summer Vacation, Threesome - M/M/M, Underage Drinking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-05-29 01:24:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 31,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15062000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneHitWondersAnonymous/pseuds/Blame%20Canada
Summary: Craig was not an extraordinary person. He wore his t-shirts and jeans more than once before washing them like everybody else. He was a perfectly average student, with a perfectly average family, and soon to be a perfectly average college life ahead of him. It was mundane, ideal- exactly what he wanted.Except for one thing; one gigantic, terrible thing:The ridiculous crush he had on a notoriously risky, probably hypersexual, extraordinary boy named Tweek.And when offered a taste of what he always dreamed of, Craig discovers that his understanding of his crush is so far off the mark, he can't find the target.E for explicit sexual content, including dub con which is clearly marked at the beginning of the chapter. Creek with a side of Creekenny. A love story in reverse. High school AU.





	1. Tunnel Vision

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This is a story I never thought I'd be writing, but honestly it came very naturally to me, and then became a challenge I'm glad to take on. Some of the things wrapped up in here are themes I've never touched, so I can't promise perfection- I can only promise the effort. 
> 
> "Wow, a high school AU? Really?" you may be asking, but I assure you, I'm asking that too. I think that I've just read enough of these stories to know what I like and dislike in them, and that inspires me to try writing what I would want to read, if I mixed them all together. Or something.
> 
> I don't think this project will be very long, but it'll be long enough to have several chapters. We'll see!

If Craig had to describe him in just one sentence, right now, he would call him a will-o'-wisp, slinking through the air like an ethereal snake, with the heat of an exploding star. He wasn’t restricted to just one sentence, however, and perhaps that was his sweetest solace in a world in which he wasn’t his.

Craig scratched at the lined paper of his dilapidated spiral notebook, having seen better days since the beginning of the school year, with his squeaking mechanical pencil. His notes were sporadic, and admittedly bad—he usually relied on his friends to share and help him study. Instead of notes, he filled his papers with words. Not exactly poetry, but not meaningless either. They were the words that popped into his head, and maybe they could be repurposed into song lyrics or sonnets, but for now, they were the disconnected thoughts that fogged over his mind while he was meant to be paying attention in class. It was the end of senior year, however, and therefore Craig didn’t really care anymore.

The thought that the year was closing out depressed him, immensely so. It wasn’t because he’d be away from home, or he would be splitting away from the friends he’d had since elementary; it was because his will-o’-wisp, exploding star, his deepest, darkest secret dream would be out of reach, officially. He’d been out of reach for two and a half years, and Craig was brutally aware that that wasn’t going to change when he only had five months until he left town for what should be a better life.

How much better could it be, though, without the sun to blind him?

He wrote ‘will-o’-wisp’ and ‘ethereal’ in the margins of his paper, and the bell rang to drag him from his seat and into the bustling halls of high school. He was immune to the roar of chatter and laughter, and he towered over most of his peers, even though he slouched most of the time. He tugged on the strap of his backpack and let out a lazy yawn, blinking away sleepiness that had never quite left him since freshman year. His friends were waiting for him.

“What took you so long?” Clyde nagged, but he was smiling, which meant that he didn’t mean it. He usually didn’t.

“Wasn’t paying attention,” Craig muttered back, leaning in to be able to hear them from over the odd screeching and crashing locker doors that overtook their only neutral zone. Generally, they were ready to bolt as soon as the bell rang, but his head had been much too preoccupied, and sad.

Clyde shrugged at him, and that was the end of it.

“We still doing movies at my house Friday?” Token asked, and Clyde lit back up.

“Heeell,” he started, and as he dragged the word out, he spun on his heels in a circle before throwing out duel finger guns, “yeah.” His smug smile was funny enough to make Craig huff a heavy breath through his nose, an inkling of a laugh.

“Wait, lemme t-t—try it,” Jimmy said, his toothy grin covered in metal. “F-f-fuh-” he stuttered, and as he did so, he shuffled around on his crutches to make a slower, but equally exciting circle. Once he made it around his circle, he threw out his finger guns in kind. “F-fuck yes.”

Craig snorted, as did Token, and Clyde let out a giggle. “Bruh, that was amazing.” Clyde held out a hand for a high-five, and Jimmy gladly slapped it.

Then Craig looked over Jimmy’s shoulder, and he suddenly caught the honeydew eyes of his persistent obsession. It made the depression in his soul stab him a little harder in the chest, because those honeydew eyes had to turn back to shake off the girls he had been talking to.

Most likely flirting. Tweek very proudly didn’t belong to anyone.

He started walking over, all the confidence in the world for a boy barely reaching five-foot-eight, with that damn crooked grin blasting Craig like a solar flare, and his eyes alight with it too. He got up relatively close, but not close enough, and said a very casual, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Craig said in response, and he wished he’d sounded as relaxed as Tweek did. Whenever Tweek came around, his throat closed up just enough to make his voice meek and unremarkable. Just like the rest of him, he supposed.

“You got a sec?” Tweek asked, his speaking just a tad too fast and raspy, but still sweetened by his smile. Craig nodded his head and took a few steps away from his crew. They made kissy faces over Tweek’s head, which he tried his best to ignore.

“You wanna get fucked up tomorrow?” Tweek asked, so worryingly nonchalant.

It was a Tuesday.

“Tomorrow? As in Wednesday?” Craig said, and even though it was ridiculous and probably not going to mean anything, he felt his heartbeat flutter, skipping a beat at the prospect of spending any time with Tweek at all.

Sometimes, Tweek would just do this. He’d come up to Craig and ask if he wanted to pull some crazy stunt or another, like it was fine and like they had any common ground at all. As though imprisonment and cops didn’t exist. Tweek acted a lot like he could to refuse the law out of existence if he wanted, which was just another piece of the puzzle that made his mysterious energy attractive. Craig licked his lips.

“What kind of fucked up?”

Tweek rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a fucking prude, man. It’s just weed. And alcohol but you know,” he said, waving his hand away, as though Craig would understand. He didn’t really, but could guess that most things that Tweek engaged with involved alcohol. They had so far. “Mm, maybe whatever else Kenny has lying around.”

“Well,” Craig said, frankly, “that could be anything.”

Tweek laughed, throwing his head back a bit as he did so unashamedly, and when he settled down, he smirked at him. “Exactly.” He snapped his finger into a gun at him the way Clyde had just done minutes ago, but now it was hot. God, Craig had the most burning, painful crush on him—it was the only way finger guns could be hot.

“So you in?” Tweek asked, the energy palpable in his bright smile, and Craig felt a pang of fear in his chest. It was so on the spot. Craig swallowed, hard.

“Can I get back to you?” he replied, lamely, like he was some sort of associate in an office job. God, may as well have an ill-fitting button-up shirt tucked behind a thick brown belt like the IT guys in the movies. Or like his dad.

Tweek frowned, and a flash of an unidentifiable but definitely displeased emotion crossed his face. Then it fell back into neutrality, and he shrugged. “A’ight. Lunch?”

“Lunch,” Craig confirmed, his mouth running dry, and Tweek threw a lazy peace sign before sauntering back to his previous post. Craig let out a sigh.

“What was that about?” Token asked, visibly worried, and Clyde grabbed Craig’s left arm and hung on it so hard he half-toppled over.

“Yeah bro, what did boy-wonder want with you this time?” Clyde said, his smile cheeky and wide.

“Don’t call him that,” Craig started, with a warning glance down at the parasite on his arm. Predictably, it did nothing to remove him, and he sighed again. “I’m not sure. He just asked if I wanted to hang out.”

“Oh shit,” Jimmy piped up. “You might have an i-in!”

“You think so?” Clyde asked for Craig, and he tugged on his arm tighter, eliciting a quiet ‘ow’. “I thought he was hanging with that Rebecca chick.”

“He was,” Token added, “but you know how Tweek is.”

Yeah, he did. Craig looked down, disappointed that the excited attitude his friends seemed to possess somehow passed over him. Maybe he’d resigned to his fate already. He would always be nothing but a speck of dust in the universe that Tweek’s supernova would never have noticed, in a million, billion years. He was quiet and boring and Tweek was exactly not. It’d take a miracle for Tweek to even _consider_ sticking his dick in him. He tried not to flush at the thought.

A shove to his side startled him from his self-deprecating thoughts, and he whirled around to meet Jimmy’s mischievous smirk. “Oh yeah?” he threatened, and Jimmy shoved him again, effectively knocking Clyde off his other arm—he’d have to thank him for that—and igniting the playful flame in his gut that sometimes overrode the sad. “Square up, bitch.”

“S-s-square yourself!” Jimmy said, and Craig shoved him back. He teetered on one crutch with a bit of a yelp, and Token grabbed him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t fall, but not before shooting Craig a death glare.

“Listen, I’m not going easy on him because he’s disabled. He started it.”

“Wouldn’t w-want you to, nerd,” Jimmy spat, and Token let go of him with a light sigh so that he could keep rolling his fists at him like a nerd himself. “You know I go hard. I walk with these arms, bro, try it!”

Before they could keep up their stupid shenanigans, the first bell rang, and they all groaned and moaned their displeasure at the prospect of starting up third period. The day had tragically only just begun. With a delayed twist of his stomach, Craig realized that Tweek’s proposition would be sitting in his head for the rest of the day, whether he said yes or not.

As he walked away from his friends, he muttered, “ _‘Can I get back to you?’_ God, what the hell was that?” and with a sigh and a shift of his backpack, he continued down the hall to English, where he’d think about will-o’-wisps and dying stars all over again.

 

* * *

 

English came and went with no significance, and before he knew it, he was staring at the double doors to the cafeteria, slightly (actually very) terrified of who might lie behind them. _‘Quit being a baby,’_ he scolded himself.  _‘Just say yes!’_ He’d pretended to consider his choices the past two periods, of whether he wanted to get ‘fucked up’ with his crush or hang out at home alone like he always did and do absolutely nothing of worth.

As though there had ever really been a choice.

With an apprehensive inhale he shoved in, and of course, as though his luck could lead him any differently, his arm was yanked before he could even let that breath out, and he squawked in surprise as his body was sent reeling around the door and to the table directly behind it. When he steadied, he realized it was Tweek who’d snatched him, and his anxiety hiked up from moderate to incomprehensible, alongside his embarrassment at just how much he’d been caught off guard. Tweek didn’t seem to get that from him at all though, and just continued to give him that crazed smirk with the lightning eyes that made Craig’s heart skip.

“You decide yet?” he asked, as though he could read Craig’s mind. Honestly, he wouldn’t put it past him.

“Do I ever decide?” he said, and Tweek’s eyebrows raised, as though he was pleasantly surprised with his answer.

“Nn, not really,” Tweek admitted.

“Then there’s your answer.”

Somehow, Tweek’s grin got even more impish, crinkling his eyes with its intensity. “Awesome,” he said, and he landed a gentle punch on his bicep. It hurt more than Craig wanted to admit. “Kenny’s house, by the way,” he added, and he got several strides away from Craig before his words got processed.

“Why Kenny’s?” he called over, and Tweek looked back at him with that dazzling curve of his lips, complemented by the curve of his neck where Craig dreamt of kissing him.

“It’s easier,” he called back, voice similarly raised. “Don’t get caught there!”

Well, that was fair.

Craig nodded, and Tweek waved him off before disappearing into the fray, which Craig scanned over for his friends. He spotted Jimmy first, then the rest of them in how they horse-shoed around him for another of his stories, no doubt. He sauntered over with as little effort as possible, and Token slapped his hand on his back to welcome him in.

He felt a bit bad for not paying attention, but Jimmy closed out his story with a good-natured laugh from the rest of the guys not long after, and he figured he just had to have been there for the set-up. Tweek’s invitation clouded over his head so that he couldn’t think straight regardless. That smile taunted him, as it often did, and reappeared every time he closed his eyes. He’d memorized it like the lame motherfucker he was.

He spent the night after school on his computer doing nothing, and lied wide awake in bed for entirely too long staring up at his ceiling, as though it could coach him through this. He truly felt like this time was different from the others though. Tweek was acting different. Craig couldn’t pinpoint _what_ was different, even as he consulted the stars on his ceiling, and he tossed and turned on what it might _mean._

God, Tweek was maddening, but maybe that was why Craig liked him so much—the insanity of it made him feel alive, more than anything else he’d tried to fill his empty life with.

Craig liked to tell people that he liked boring, but it only occurred to him now that maybe he didn’t like it, but instead tolerated it. Boring was all Craig’s life had managed to be for the past six years, but admittedly, it hadn’t been too hard to self-inflict. Maybe, if Tweek had stuck around all those years ago when they were little, if they hadn’t split up over something stupid, Craig wouldn’t have had to get content with boring. Would Tweek still be interesting? Craig decided that if there was any constant to this god forsaken earth, it was that Tweek would always be interesting.

Next thing he knew, his alarm was blaring (fuck six am), and he’d be going to Kenny’s house in twelve hours, and somehow, it didn’t feel like nearly enough time.


	2. Only For You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know what I'm doing but I'm having a good time and that's what matters!!

Craig’s stomach was a ball of nerves the entirety of the day. What did ‘fucked up’ mean this time? Why did he never ask? Why did he keep doing this to himself? But alas! He was reminded of why when green eyes flicked over to meet his and they devastated him from several yards away, where he waited in the lunch line. He then winked, or twitched-either was possible, really. And what did _that_ mean?

Tweek stood from his seat and crossed the room as though parting the Red Sea, and Craig felt that ball of nerves explode, every bit as transfixed with the way Tweek’s hips swayed as ever. Tweek stopped himself right up close to Craig’s side with a bit of mischief in his grin, which was not uncommon, especially with adventures to be had later.

“Hey,” Tweek said, shrugging (or twitching).

Craig responded with his usual, completely unremarkable, “Hey.”

“So,” Tweek started, and he sucked on his lower lip idly while he twisted one of his shoes into the ground. “You’re still gonna, nn, join us right?” He looked up, and his eyes looked so round and wide from this angle, where he stood just a few inches too close so that he had to tilt up his chin. Craig wanted so desperately to hook it with his knuckles and lean down to-

Craig was startled from his imagination by a rough shove to his shoulder that forced him into the rest of the lunch line, which yelled in response. “Earth to Craig? Mm?” He was smiling, but his eyebrows were raised, and the cheekiness of his look was enough to make Craig question if he was being _flirted_ with. That was ridiculous though, and Craig pushed it far, far away, into the farthest recesses of his brain where all his painful assumptions went.

“Craig’s not here right now,” he muttered, and Tweek snorted at him.

“Clearly.”

A somewhat awkward silence fell between them. Craig continued moving forward in the lunch line toward the propped door—the point that Tweek wouldn’t be able to follow—but he kept shuffling alongside him. Odd. Everything about this was odd.

“You should come over at like, mm, five,” Tweek piped up suddenly, and Craig made very deliberate eye contact with him. He was smiling again, unwilling to back down one bit to his deadpan stare. “I’m excited,” he continued. Craig had a hard time believing that Tweek Tweak would be excited to do anything with him at all, especially knowing that whenever he got invited, all Craig seemed to do was follow around behind him while he performed his nerve-wracking, downright nonsensical stunts.

“Do I get to know why?” Craig chanced, but immediately after Tweek opened his mouth to reply, the lunch line made its moans and groans again, and he realized he was holding up the line at the doorway where Tweek would have to split.

He was promptly pushed forward and out of earshot.

Craig stumbled over his spindly legs down the lane of hungry students, irritated at the mass of angsty teenagers for getting in the way of his very important, very awkward conversation. When he looked out the frosty window behind him, he could see Tweek gesturing wildly at his phone, and Craig nodded at him. A flurry of nervous excitement scrambled his insides; texts from Tweek were few and far between, and usually rather overwhelming. He assumed that was what that meant, anyway—a text.

He pulled his phone out of his back pocket, but when he opened his messages, he had nothing new from Tweek in them. He grabbed a prepackaged muffin while he scrolled through dozens of conversations to get to Tweek’s, frozen in time three months prior.

 

_M ognna b at ur place in 10. ‘_

_U got a rope???_

_Gonna_

 

_Why do I need a rope._

 

_Youll see!!! (:_

 

He didn’t have any rope.

It was supposed to be for a tire swing, apparently, which Tweek had decided he wanted to mount over the creek five minutes before texting him. Not nearly as exciting as he’d feared.

Craig sighed and went to pocket his phone, disappointed, but as he finished punching in his lunch account, a distinct double-vibration graced his fingertips. He finished his transaction as quickly as possible before he tore his phone back out of his pocket. The cashier guy yelled at him for being on his phone, which he ignored. He rounded the corner out of the lunch line and just barely out of the way of traffic, pressing his back into the wall and balancing his tray in one hand while he unlocked his phone with the other. His chest felt surreally light, uncomfortably so. He sucked in a quick breath before opening the highlighted conversation.

 

_We’ll see (:_

 

Two words. One text emoji. Not even a picture one! He could scream.

“That sonuva-“

Craig whipped his head up and caught only the faintest spark of Tweek’s eye before he turned away and walked out of the cafeteria, where now Craig could not follow. He had his hand half-raised, shaken back at him in a lazy wave, clearly expressing that he was well aware of the game he’d played. _‘That sonuva bitch,’_ he thought.

Craig let out the air stuck in his lungs before it could grow mildewy. As he trudged to the table where Clyde sat with all his stupid athletic friends, all sweaty and gross after always coming here right after gym class, he rolled _‘We’ll see (:’_ around in his head like marbles in a labyrinth. One of the tiny ones, like his orthodontist used to have to mess around with in between torturing his mouth. Like them, his brain was also tiny and stupid, for consistently falling into the traps Tweek carefully laid out for him. Self-inflicted, though, so it was whatever, right?

“Hey bro!” Clyde exclaimed, expression brightening up the moment he noticed him approaching. The rest of the crew gave a half-hearted greeting; they definitely didn’t care about him, but Clyde did, so they let him sit there. Craig sighed lightly, and smiled back. At least he had some really good friends.

Craig fidgeted all through the rest of his school day, walked home at a brisk pace, and barely paid his family any mind for his entire afternoon, which he supposed was typical anyway. He had places to be this time though--very important places to be, since Tweek was going to be there. At Kenny’s house, though? That was strange.

He’d overthought the whole thing, of course, always.

When he rapped his fist on the front of Kenny’s door, stuck in the awkward stage of waiting between the screen door and the regular one, he gave himself his mini pep talk once more. _‘I’m here to do whatever Tweek wants to do. I’m here for Tweek. Here for Tweek. Do what he wants, I might get a chance. I’m here for Tweek.’_

Ironically, it was Kenny who answered the door.

“My man!” he cried out, and he gave Craig one of those awkward one armed man-hugs before ushering him inside. Tweek was already there and curled up on the couch, and Craig’s stomach did a flip. Tweek waved at him again, in that lazy way he always did it, and Craig made a little one curling his fingers in and out to reciprocate. Tweek kind of rolled his eyes, and Craig hoped it wasn’t at him, even though he knew he’d waved back kind of stupidly. He took his time tearing his shoes off at the door (not that it mattered, he was fairly certain the McCormicks did not vacuum or care for this carpet in the slightest) then waited for his next social cue.

“Ah, right! Lemme introduce ya to my good pal Tweek, here,” Kenny said, the joke clear in his eyes, and Craig gave an awkward little laugh to humor him. They didn’t make eye contact.

“Can we, hnn, go back to the movie?” Tweek whined, shuffling his feet under the blanket so that it roiled like the waves of the ocean. “I’m getting _so_ bored.”

“Hold your gay-ass little horses, dude,” Kenny retorted, his tone snappy but still somehow playful. Craig walked himself in a bit, and as soon as Kenny sat down and wrapped an arm around Tweek’s shoulders, Craig felt everything in him deplete like a sad party balloon.

Putting your arm around someone while you’re watching a movie is absolutely a suggestive move, there was no doubt. And all at once, Craig realized that he was going to be a third wheel to an asshole he barely cared about, and his crush that he cared about too much. “C’mon,” Kenny said, motioning with his free arm for him to join them on the couch with enthusiasm, but Craig still felt his soul shriveling up and his face going white.

He figured he was going to pass out if he didn’t sit down soon anyway, so he obeyed despite the screams in his brain, leaving plenty of space between his thigh and Kenny’s and sitting as straight and uncomfortably as possible. Kenny gave him a weirded out, questioning look, then shrugged, and turned back to the TV to press play and get cozy again with Tweek on the other end of the couch. It may has well have been across the universe, for how far away he felt, but Craig couldn’t back out now. He was already there, had made himself fully present, taken off his shoes and everything, and there was nothing he could do about it except try to pay attention to the shitty movie put on.

They had blankets covering the windows to make it dark in the early evening hours while the sun still blazed. Kenny was like the blankets too, he supposed—they were both the obstacles, blocking out suns and darkening Craig’s mind, keeping his heart away from warmth and light that he so desperately _needed._ He took a beer from Kenny without a second glance and sucked half of it down quickly, hoping it might kick in faster, because this was painfully awkward and terrible and not what he’d expected at all.

Tweek was full of adventures. He was exciting, different, lively and lovely, and watching a movie at Kenny’s house? It was nothing, nothing at all in comparison. Maybe he didn’t know Tweek at all, though. Maybe Tweek did actually like sitting around watching bad movies in the twilight instead of playing chicken with cargo trains and balancing on bridges. The thought made Craig sick again, so he sighed, took another sip of the shitty beer Kenny had on hand, and prayed the night would pass him quickly by so he could feel like useless garbage in his own bed sooner than later.

 

* * *

 

Craig did not feel sufficiently under the influence for this.

He’d had what, one drink? And sure, it had helped him loosen up, as he wasn’t a huge drinker in the first place, but nothing could have truly prepared him for looking away from the dumb action flick they picked off netflix to find Kenny and Tweek making out like their lives depended on it.

His stomach sunk so fast he felt close to vomiting, and the pit in his chest grew actively painful. It flared in his ribs like a burn, radiating through his limbs so violently that he went numb as a result. His mind went blank just long enough for him to watch Kenny’s hand disappear up Tweek’s shirt, and then he stood straight up.

“‘Ay, what the fuck?” Kenny complained, detaching himself from Tweek’s mouth with a sickening smack, but Craig just felt fire bloom from the waves that threatened to overcome him, full of anger at his stupidity, his complete naiveté, his-

“Yo, I thought he was in?” he heard Kenny say, and Tweek hissed something back, but Craig paid him no mind as he walked to the door and grabbed his sneakers a little more violently than he intended.

He felt a hand touch his shoulder as he tried to lace his first shoe, and he shrugged it off roughly, with a heated, hurried, “No, I’m out, sorry. This isn’t what I-”

Before he could say a word more, and just as he lifted his head to look at who, exactly, was touching him, his chin was grabbed and lips were crashed harshly onto another’s. His eyes were wide open, and with a sharp intake of breath through his nose, he realized he saw Kenny on the couch across the room.

Tweek. He was kissing Tweek.

Just like that, every inhibition flew out the window, and Craig grabbed the sides of Tweek’s face to pull him into the deepest, most dramatic kiss he’d ever done. Pretty smooth too, he’d say, considering the little moan that Tweek let out into the open caverns of their mouths. With such incentive, he stroked his tongue even more aggressively, and with a power Craig didn’t realize he already possessed, he took Tweek’s sides and shoved him backwards back onto the couch with a guttural growl.

“Whoa,” Kenny said, a nuisance in the background of Craig’s euphoria, “hot.”

The pure, desperate _need_ that coursed through Craig’s veins dizzied him, and judging by the soft mewls and gasps Tweek was making between frenzied kisses, Tweek had to have some of it too.

Somewhere, deep in the back of Craig’s brain, his insecurities whispered to him the reminder that Tweek loved to mess around with pretty much anyone.

He shoved them as far away as possible as he tore the collar of his shirt to the side and bit down on the crook of Tweek’s neck.

Tweek let out the most gorgeous hitched gasp, and Craig sucked gently around his lingering teeth marks, twisting his tongue over the indents and breathing heavily over it so that Tweek shivered underneath him. Tweek quit his moaning when they both heard Kenny clear his throat loudly over them.

“This is excitin’ and everything,” he drawled, “but I thought I was allowed in on this one?”

Craig paused in his efforts to create an uneven hickey on Tweek’s shoulder and, full of growing confusion and nervousness, he got himself up off Tweek (somehow he’d ended up kinda sorta straddling him). He looked back at Kenny and then down at Tweek, who was making an adorable face that seemed to beg for his forgiveness. “Y-yeah, see, I didn’t _really_ ask him-”

“Aw, really dude?” Kenny complained. _“Fuck,_ Tweek, you horny bastard.” Tweek laughed nervously, and Kenny pressed at his temples. “Jesus.”

Craig’s eyes kept jumping back and forth so much that it was starting to make his head hurt, and he quit to cough into his elbow awkwardly. “Uh, what are you talking about-”

“This ain’t no fuckin’ watch party, bud,” Kenny said, and the usual easygoing, confident smirk that blessed his conventionally attractive face returned from the irritation that had stolen it. “Or at least, I don’t want it to be. You got a pretty face.”

Craig flushed, deeper than he already had with his tongue on Tweek’s skin, and he looked at Tweek again. He looked delirious, but in a good way- the happy kind that meant he was deeply pleased in a way his regular face couldn’t replicate. He rasped, “Sorry. Surprise?”

“Surprise?” Craig repeated, louder, and Kenny came up behind their tangle of limbs to drag him off and pull him toward his bedroom. He had absolutely _no_ idea what was going on, but Tweek was following them, and despite knowing the crazy shit Tweek got up to constantly, that made him feel safer.

“You’re eighteen, right?” Kenny asked as he shut his bedroom door behind Tweek, having released his painful hold on Craig’s wrist. Craig shook it out and nodded. “Cool. So you in?”

“In _what?”_ he asked, exasperated, and Kenny closed the distance between them to pull him down into an open-mouthed kiss.

“One of us, both of us, none of us,” Tweek listed off, having fully recovered from Craig’s initial assault, but now Craig was weak under Kenny’s masterful hold, and he bit back whines as Kenny trailed wet kisses down his jawline and directly over his Adam’s apple, “whichever.”

Kenny pulled back—a tragedy—and tugged at the bottom of Craig’s T-shirt, his eyebrows raised and Tweek’s mouth pulled into a crazed grin, and then, it managed to click.

_Oh._

“Oh,” he vocalized, and Kenny rolled his eyes as he let go of Craig’s shirt to pull off his own in a flash.

“Whatever. If you’re not in, I’m fucking Tweek.”

“No, wait! Yes,” Craig said, and he clumsily tore his shirt over his head and worked on his belt buckle with feverishly trembling fingers. “Yes, holy shit.”

“Awesome,” Kenny said with a toothy, devilish grin, and he slid his hands up from Craig’s chest, over his shoulders, and around his neck, to hook them together and pull them close. Kenny’s skin was cold.

As Kenny did this, Craig looked behind him to see Tweek inspect his own ruffled shirt before tugging it off over his head, and he realized all three of them were shirtless. Oh, God. Jesus Christ, forgive him, but he was in a room with two attractive men ready to fuck around, and his dick had already grown half-hard. He was about to sin harder than he ever had in his whole life consisting of exactly 4 extremely exciting 30-second lays, and all he could think about was that this wasn’t what he was expecting.

Craig had no idea what he was doing, why, or how, but he sure was doing it, and as Kenny moved in for another kiss, he tried to calm his churning stomach by reminding himself that this was what he always wanted. He just hadn’t realized what it’d really be. He hadn’t known anything at all. He was ridiculously uninformed, overwhelmed, and incapable of deciding if these butterflies were fear or excitement.

He willed them to be excitement, with all his might, even as the brushing of Kenny’s lips against his own sent a jolt of pure energy down his every limb. He was paralyzed, but in fear, or in ecstasy? He didn’t know, he didn’t know, but oh, he _did_ know, but he’d wanted this for _so_ long.

So he kissed him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit warning goes into effect next chapter. I'll make a warning there also once it's posted, if you're not into it. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think if you've got a moment!


	3. Tell Me I'm the Only One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sex is not all it's cracked up to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys. This is a pretty graphic chapter, so I am going to put a huge warning right here:
> 
> THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS DUBIOUS CONSENT AND EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT. 
> 
> If you feel that you are unable to handle topics such as this, please skip over this chapter, or move along entirely. After initially inquiring with the audience, I have put the "Rape/Non-Con" tag on the story, just to be safe. Please proceed with caution with this tag in mind!

Kenny kissed slower than Tweek. Tweek’s movements were erratic, forceful and random but still erotic, whereas Kenny had a certain finesse to his movements that made Craig feel as though he was wading through water. As such, he hardly noticed as Kenny guided him onto his mattress on the floor, deeply entranced by his capabilities.

Craig understood now why it was that Tweek seemed to favor Kenny.

The excitement of the moment filled his stomach with butterflies that made him almost nauseous, and his thoughts were reduced to feelings that he could barely articulate. His dick seemed to get it, though, as it quickly began to harden while Kenny’s tongue continued to massage his own. There was a hiccup in the motion of him getting laid down and Kenny’s mouth disconnected from his with a slight smacking sound. Some of the air flew out of him when his back hit Kenny’s lumpy mattress, and then Craig began to struggle to keep his eyes in focus as Kenny dragged his hands down his rib cage and into the indents of his pelvis. He let out a low moan that sounded as needy as it felt.

God, when even was the last time he’d done something, anything? Was it that period he spent trying desperately to get over Tweek, in what he would come to realize was a completely fruitless endeavor? He’d learned quickly that, as frustrating as it was, his feelings toward Tweek were not purely sexual, and so messing around in the woods with an upperclassman would not and did not cure him of his disease. That must have been almost two years ago.

Though Kenny’s hands felt good on his bare skin, fantastic even, a lot of Craig wished they were Tweek’s. Regardless, they helped clumsily push Craig’s shirt up and over his head, as though there was no time to waste. While he pulled his head through the collar, Craig caught a glance of Tweek digging through Kenny’s shitty dresser, face blank for all but the tiniest spark of what  _ might _ be excitement glimmering in his eye. He shivered when Kenny’s hands touched him again, feeling even colder without his shirt to envelope them and sending chills up his goosebumped spine.

Craig knew this was a routine ;  Tweek wasn’t quiet about the things he liked to do in his spare time. Even so, watching him pull lube and condoms out of Kenny’s sock drawer with complete stoicism was unusual. At the same time, it was kind of hot — no, extremely hot, that he was in such control. Control was something Tweek never seemed to have a lot of when they were kids, but here, in the sanctuary of Kenny’s bedroom, he acted as though he’d never lost it.

His shoulder was shaken and Craig snapped his attention back to Kenny, who was looking at him with mild irritation from above. “You with it?” he asked, his tone callous and impatient, and Craig winced.

“He’s fine,” Tweek interjected, and he knelt down to give Craig a long, measured, deep kiss before he could reply. His fingers tangled up in his hair and gripped at the roots, and his nails felt blunt and short against his scalp. He pulled them apart by Craig’s hair, and Craig’s eyes fluttered open to see Tweek’s mischievous grin up close and personal. “Right?”

Craig felt a bit dazed like this, Tweek’s face right there and Kenny’s just a shoulder length behind, a pair of thumbs massaging his hips that must belong to Kenny but that Craig honestly couldn’t differentiate between. “Yeah,” he breathed, “yeah, I’m good.”

“Good,” Kenny said, his voice low and eyes hooded while a smirk broke open to show off canines, looking very much like a famished wild animal, moments from striking. Strike he did, too, in the form of lowering his lips to Craig’s skin and pressing sensual kisses into his lower abdomen and down the trail of hair that disappeared into his jeans. Craig shuddered, arching his back and shutting his eyes as the sensation became too much to bear with more than sense of touch. Sight was meaningless in the throes of sex, when hot mouths and skin hitting skin was all that registered alongside the gloriously disgusting sounds of a wet rhythm, like the beating of a drum. God, he really did need to get laid if he was romanticizing  _ sounds. _

Kenny had undone his jeans and tugged at them lightly, to help Craig get the picture, and he hastily shoved them off so that all that remained were his old boxer-briefs and a pair of ancient white socks. “You been fucked before?” Kenny asked, and Craig nodded, a whine in his throat as Kenny’s hand cupped his dick and rubbed against it over his underwear. “Extra good,” he purred, and with a move that was movie-worthy, he pulled his boxers out from under his ass and halfway down his legs, which Craig then dutifully removed along with his socks.

It took him a moment to realize that he was now completely naked, lying in the center of Kenny’s mattress and panting with a mostly-hard dick resting on his stomach. Fear gripped him, or something more like embarrassment and self-consciousness. “Fuck, you look so…” Tweek started, pausing on a hunt for the right word, and Craig tried to fill in the blank with sinking despair.

_ Ugly? Boring? Unsexy beyond belief? _

“Beautiful.”

Butterflies caressed his organs in a wave of euphoria, and he smiled slightly, still feeling awkward but at least attractive. “Thanks?” he said, and Tweek shook his head.

“Oh no, thank  _ you,” _ he mumbled. He made one great spasm that pinched all his right side muscles and made his body crunch into itself, and then he swooped down to grab Craig’s chin and kiss him as hungrily as he had before.

Craig closed his eyes again and moaned into his mouth, their jaws stretched wide open but lips still encompassing each other so that a wide cavern was made to explore with their tongues. Tweek’s hand felt strong where it gripped his chin, and when he tried to bring his hand up to thread it into Tweek’s hair, he was shaken off with a growl.

Confused but not turned off, he kept up their frenzied kissing, while Kenny started to stroke his cock in slow, measured pumps. He broke the kiss to gasp at the shock of his cold hands, and Tweek kept ahold of his face and stared him straight in the eyes, pausing their sloppy make out. Craig felt excess spit all over his chin where Tweek’s fingers didn’t hold it.

“You gonna be the bitch?” Tweek asked, his eye contact surprisingly stable and overpowering. Craig blinked at him and started to stutter, to ask him what the hell that meant, but Kenny distracted him by running wet fingers down the inner crease of his thigh, making him shiver and moan.

“W-wha-”

“Are you,” Tweek tried again, his words deliberate and punctuated, overwhelmingly so, “gonna be the bitch?”

“I-a-ah,  _ hah, _ I guess?” he tried, terribly distracted by the hidden hands now massaging his thighs and teasing the sensitive areas between his legs.

Tweek smiled at the same time his eye twitched, looking positively unhinged, and said nothing. Instead, he used his thumb and forefinger to shove Craig’s jaw up to forcibly arch his neck, and sunk his teeth into the tender crook of his neck. Craig yelped and gasped, relishing in the warmth of Tweek’s tongue as it lapped around the mark as though to heal it, and dug his fingers into the mattress beneath him to ground himself. There were so many things happening at once that he could hardly make sense of, but at least the mattress was there.

Kenny’s fingers continued to get closer to his asshole, and all Craig could clearly think about was how glad he was that he’d showered basically immediately before getting here, like his subconscious knew what was going to happen even if his immediate brain had been blinded by his lack of confidence. Tweek stopped sucking on his neck and let go of his jaw, but only gave Craig enough time to click it back in place with a couple stretches before diving in for another aggressive hickey, this time on his shoulder.

Craig yelped again, but this time Tweek’s hand came up to clamp over his mouth and grip it tight so that it hurt. More confusion swirled around in his stomach, making him uneasy and nervous. “Shh,” Tweek whispered harshly into his ear, and Craig swallowed hard and nodded, unable to voice his understanding. Vague as it was, he did understand. Something about this experience was putting him into a very obvious, very deliberate place of submission, and he had previously been unsure how he felt about a thing like that. He knew he liked getting fucked, but submission like this had never been something he’d been able to hash out. This though, he liked this so far, and so he breathed heavily through his uncovered nose, and looked down at Kenny while he uncapped the lube and poured it over his fingers.

Craig swallowed, and tried to relax. It was a little hard though, with a hand restricting his mouth and another starting to tease one of his nipples, and one mouth gnawing at his collar bone. It was so much, so so much, and the nervousness in his gut was distracting him from loosening up. Still, Kenny managed to rub a tight ring around his hole, and force his finger down to the knuckle inside of him with one reckless shove.

Craig’s breath hitched and tears pricked at his eyes, the pain sudden and tears involuntary, and tried to calm his racing heart while Kenny began to push and pull his finger in and out of him. He had one hand cupping his ass, which he squeezed every once in a while to make his breath hitch all over again, every time. Tweek’s hand over his mouth was starting to really hurt, and he let out a bit of a pathetic whine while he shook his head to try to get him to remove it.

It worked—his mouth was freed from its restriction, and he used that freedom to take in large gulps of air. His throat was dry, and his ass was tight, and before he could thank Tweek for letting him go, every single thing about the present was cut to a flatline when his cheek was struck with a flat, practiced hand.

Craig gasped as his neck cracked in the twist forced by the impact, and primal fear ran cold into his bloodstream. Kenny’s finger kept its momentum while he tried to breathe, and he slowly turned his head back to look at the hand that smacked him.

“I can’t  _ -nngh- _ fucking suck your neck with your head in the way and you can’t keep making all this goddamn noise!” Tweek shrieked, and before Craig could come back with how loudly he was talking now being hardly any quieter than his (now embarrassing) moans, Kenny penetrated him with a second finger, just as rapidly and painfully as the first. His breaths were fast, too fast to talk, and he desperately wanted to. Tweek looked angry, which was terrifying in this vulnerable place, and the water lining his eyes started to feel less involuntary. 

“Wh-why did you hit me?” he managed to gasp out, and Tweek blinked, like he’d asked a stupid question.

“We’re playing a scene. Ever done that?”

Craig had not, and that was apparently clear on his face. Tweek grunted in frustration, and sat back, urging Kenny to continue stretching him. Craig kind of wished he would stop, but he didn’t want the whole thing to stop, desperately, so he endured it. The pain was fading with each passing moment anyway, and little spikes of pleasure were starting to make his toes curl and his palms sweat.

“We’re just pretending. It’s not real.” Tweek leaned back in to touch Craig’s face where he’d struck it, and the skin was still hot, proven by how cold his fingertip felt. “I’m not,  _ nn,  _ not actually mad at you.” There was a slight air of softness in his voice as he said the words that gave Craig goosebumps, and though he didn’t fully understand at the time (as he was compromised), he nodded his okay at the explanation. “Kenny, stop,” Tweek said, and Kenny’s fingers stopped midway through another push in.

“What? Why?”

Tweek ignored him, and looked Craig right in the eye. His gaze was maddening, gorgeous and frustrating. Fuck, Craig had fallen in love with those eyes  _ years _ ago.

“Do you still want to do this? I can not hit you anymore,” Tweek offered, like it was something normal to suggest continuing to do otherwise. Which, Craig guessed, possibly was normal for them. Maybe all the people Tweek fucked went through this, this confusing set of emotions bookended by dread that he wanted to ignore in favor of the chance to consummate his crush.

He considered his options.

He could keep doing whatever this was. Sex, he supposed, but it didn’t feel the same as the few instances of sex he’d had before. Maybe this was how it was supposed to feel. Craig really didn’t know what to think, but he also didn’t think feeling afraid was normal. Unless, maybe doing a scene or whatever Tweek had just described  _ did _ mean that. He was only vaguely familiar with the concepts of BDSM, mostly because it wasn’t something that appealed to him. Was all sex with Tweek like this, with hitting and yelling and biting? The biting was good, he liked that part, but still.

Or, he could stop. He could put an end to this, leave now and go back to his house to cry it out in his bedroom. He had daydreamed about having sex with Tweek for years,  _ years, _ and if he said no now, this surprise chance would be dashed, possibly forever. Tweek wouldn’t want to fuck him and then wouldn’t want to date him, and all the pining he’d done for ages would be for nothing.

He didn’t feel okay. Kenny’s fingers were still in his ass. Why did he want to cry?

“Yes,” he said, his mind made up though it filled him with unease, “I want to do this.”

“Okay,” Tweek confirmed, and he looked away for just a moment to nod at Kenny to keep going, and knobby fingers continued their stretching from where they left off. “Can I cum in your mouth?” he asked, and again, Craig was caught off guard. “I’m clean,” he assured, and a bit of Craig’s apprehension melted away. Then, he realized that meant he’d be sucking Tweek’s dick, and all of his concerns went out the window in favor of salivating at the thought. He nodded, and Tweek smiled at him, something pure and mismatched from the rest of the scenery around him, and he tugged down his pants to start stroking his own dick to get sufficiently hard.

Craig was going to offer to do it for him, but he didn’t get the chance. Instead, Tweek grabbed a fistful of his hair, and pulled up his head. Craig gasped, the pain sharp like needles all over his scalp. “Flip him over,” he commanded, and Kenny pulled his fingers from his ass to grab his legs and turn him onto his stomach roughly. His one hand left lube in a ring around his thigh.

Tweek yanked on his hair again, and Craig whined quietly, looking up at him from his vulnerable position with his ass hefted up into the air by Kenny’s strong hands. There was the unmistakable sound of a wrapper getting tugged open behind him, along with more lube being uncapped and squirted. The tip of Kenny’s cock teased around the entrance of his stretched asshole, and Tweek jerked Craig’s neck up to meet his own hard dick. “Suck it,” he ordered, and with a lick of his lips, Craig complied.

His precum was salty and kind of thin compared to his own, but Craig was so consumed with the fact that it was  _ Tweek’s _ cock in his mouth that it could taste like the gym locker room floor for all he cared. He ran his tongue along the underside of it, teasing the tip and easing his jaw and mouth into the coming rhythm, but his prep work was cut short when he was promptly reminded there was someone else horny in the room. Kenny’s hands had gripped his hips, and with barely a warning sign, he thrusted into him in a calculated burst of searing energy. Craig was shoved forward with the force and he coughed and gagged around Tweek’s cock, surprised and forced into a sudden deep-throating. He quickly retreated away, sputtering and coughing from the trauma of the choking hazard, but Tweek tugged on his hair again at the same time that Kenny smacked his ass. He made a tiny yipping sound, like a pathetic chihuahua with its tail stepped on, and Tweek silenced that  _ really _ quickly by shoving him back at the head of his wet cock. “S _ uck it,” _ he snipped, and Craig obliged, the saliva from a few moments before already cold in his mouth.

Kenny began to thrust, and Craig tried to keep a rhythm going of taking Tweek’s dick in and out of his mouth, but again, it didn’t feel right. He felt floaty, not quite there, despite the fact that Kenny was penetrating him  _ just right _ so that it sent crazy strong ripples of pleasure up his spine and down his legs, radiating like electricity. That was supposed to feel great, amazing even, but he was confused. He was trying to suck dick at the same time, which didn’t help, but he felt…

Used.

He felt like a toy. Like he wasn’t human, a living, breathing individual.

Especially when he could barely breathe with the way Tweek was forcing his mouth and throat on his cock with his hair in his unrelenting fist.

The sudden understanding sent devastation straight to his stomach, and fear to his chest, and he really,  _ really _ wanted to stop. But Kenny was balls-deep, and Tweek seemed close to orgasm somehow, and he didn’t feel he had a choice in leaving them hanging. His own dick felt neglected, untouched while the two of them…  _ used _ him, which made him feel absolutely terrible. Like a slut. An ugly, useless cum-dumpster.

He really wanted to cry. More than he had earlier. The fear was overtaking the depression quickly, and it mounted in his ribcage in a way that stifled his lungs and made it increasingly difficult to heave breaths through his nose. Kenny’s hands were so rough and tight on his hips that he was certain there would be bruises there later.

Then, alongside a hallelujah chorus in his head, Tweek pulled his head back (by his damn hair) and he was able to remove his mouth from Tweek’s dick with a pop and a desperate gasp for air. The taste in his mouth sucked, and everything sucked, and Kenny’s thrusting just got harder. It hurt, God it hurt, but what choice did he have? Did he ever have a choice?

“S-s…. St- ahh…” he tried, but he couldn’t even get one word out, and he was certain it just sounded like moaning. Craig didn’t want to moan though, he didn’t. He didn’t want to express pleasure in what felt like dying inside. Again, he felt like he was evaporating, like he was barely in his body, and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was above himself, observing cooly and judgingly, not even his own conscience able to give him a break. God, he really was a slut for doing this, wasn’t he? Too thirsty to think a damn thing through.

Kenny grunted, and stopped his thrusting and started to shake, and Craig guessed he must have come but wasn’t really present enough to acknowledge it. He was thankful for the end of the painful ripping back and forth, back and forth though, which felt like nauseating torture. Thank God it stopped,  _ thank God. _ His knees felt shredded up from the way they’d created friction on the mattress, and his palms the same. He could feel the imprints of Kenny’s fingers where they’d jammed themselves into his body, even though he knew he’d taken his hands off him. He was panting, and his body was begging for a release he didn’t want. The world was tilted, his vision misaligned, everything askew.

Tweek let go of his hair unexpectedly, which made him crumple onto the mattress with his ass still up in the air. Kenny had pulled out of him, but it still felt sore, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too terrible once he got up. His breathing started to even out and he closed his eyes, trying to focus on the cool sensation of the mattress on his cheek, when he was jolted back into reality by the sudden touching of his hips exactly where Kenny’s fingers had gauged his flesh.

“You wanna do that part?” he barely heard, but he registered that it was Tweek, and then there was more mumbling he couldn’t make sense of. As it happened, a pounding heartbeat leapt back into his chest so abruptly that his breath caught in his throat. He tried to turn around, to protest, do  _ something, _ but a rough hand grabbed his neck and yanked his head forward. He gasped and whimpered, and squeezed his eyes shut as he willed the whole thing to be over.

Hands that felt different from the first ones were holding his pelvis.

Smaller ones, rougher ones.

They pressed blunt crescents into his skin in stinging clamps he couldn’t wrap his head around.

Craig was made full, a dick that felt different shoved deep inside of him in one thrust that had him crying out in pain and confusion.

If he wasn’t sure if he was in his body before, he sure as hell wasn’t now. His eyes lost focus, even as another hand reached around to stroke his dick and bring him to a messy orgasm. It hardly registered, anything. Not after he’d been grabbed a second time.

Craig’s eyes felt like they were rolling in his skull, and everything about him felt far away. He was scared, uncertain, and full of shame, a deadly combination that felt like agony in his heart. He felt like he was in a white room with white walls, no windows, no furniture. He was staring at a corner, which did nothing but sit there, white on white, blank on blank. Everything was blank.

Tweek moaned and came inside him, and Craig was too tired and far away to thank God anymore.

 

* * *

 

It took Craig a long time to come back to Earth.

He’d never felt so detached before, not even in his craziest moments. It was uncomfortable, and then it was scary. He felt so barely connected to his body he wondered if maybe he’d died. He wasn’t ready to die. He let out a weak whimpering sound that he thought was out into the void of space, only to be dropped down so rapidly back into his body he felt the whiplash as a voice cleared its throat and coughed quietly.

He blinked slowly, then rapidly, as the imagery around him came back into focus. His ass was  _ cold _ \- that was when he realized he was still naked. He twisted around and groped for his bed sheets before remembering he was definitely not in his own bed. Kenny’s house was probably the only place in town with a mattress where they’d have been able to get away with this.

Straight ahead of him were Tweek’s ankles, and he looked slowly up at the rest of him to see him still without his shirt on. His face was completely blank, and perhaps that was the first time that Craig felt that maybe reality was worse than floating in the void of space; at least there, he could pretend that Tweek was smiling afterwards. Not this robotic frown that ached like Tweek had done this a hundred times and would do it a hundred more.

“Not givin’ up real estate here, jackass,” Kenny slurred, his voice husky with the exhaustion that led into a deep yawn. Craig had to put so much effort into turning his head to see him that it was alarming, frightening him more. What was happening to him? “You gotta get outta here.” This wasn’t supposed to happen.

This was supposed to be easy, right?

Craig coughed weakly, and he felt every muscle in his torso protest. His throat tasted awful. He groaned, and Kenny made an annoyed grunt. “C’mon dude, I don’t got all night.” He grabbed him by the shoulders, and suddenly Craig was upright, stark-naked and dizzy. He stumbled into Kenny, who yelped at the sudden weight of his heavy leaning while he caught his bearings. Kenny protested, and tried to help get him back into his clothes, but Craig kept staring forward at Tweek, who continued to re-dress himself like it meant nothing.

Like  _ he _ meant nothing.

Tweek’s eye contact kept flitting back and forth between his clothes and Craig, but his face didn’t budge. He said absolutely nothing, but eventually he stopped moving, and they began an uncomfortable staring contest. “Ugh,” Kenny groaned. “Y’all have your weird little convo’ I can see comin’ from a mile away. I’m gonna take a piss.”

He let go of Craig, who slowly got back down on the mattress out of necessity, but when he tried sitting normally it stung, and so his legs ended up crumpled awkwardly under his ass. His heels felt disgustingly sticky. As soon as Kenny left the room, Tweek’s brow upturned for just a second (something like worry, in Craig’s wildest dreams), before he looked away completely.

“What?” Tweek muttered, sounding agitated and tired. Craig had no answer for him. He tossed over his underwear and his jeans, and at the same time Craig found his shirt at his feet. He felt like he was moving through molasses, slow and uncoordinated and awkward like a toddler. Bending to re-dress himself hurt, and sitting hurt, and existing  _ hurt, _ much deeper than his sore muscles could touch. He swallowed hard, his throat dry and scratchy, his eyes feeling glassy, and Tweek sighed.

“S-see you tomorrow,” Tweek said. He pulled his shirt back over his head in one fluid motion.

Then he left.

Craig went numb and began to tremble before Kenny reappeared at his doorway. He tutted and helped Craig put on his socks and shoes, at least. It was something. He got led to the front door and escorted to the sidewalk, but that was as far as he went. “You gonna be okay?” Kenny asked, and Craig wished it wasn’t the first time either of them had asked him that. His knees felt weak and his gait was off, and if his house wasn’t only a couple blocks down, he would have said no.

“Yeah,” he rasped anyway, against his better judgement, and Kenny shrugged a bit before going back inside. The crash of his screen door isolated Craig in the dark, and, using his phone as a flashlight in the spots that the street lights were dead, he limped his way back home with only the crickets to accompany him. He made his quietest entrance back into his house as possible, and with each clunky step up the staircase, fire radiated down his thighs.

He hadn’t even bothered taking off his sneakers, knowing it would be too much effort. Instead, he landed face-first into his bed, and with his face buried in the soft, familiar pillowcase of his top pillow and his feet still trapped in his shoes that Kenny tied too tight, he started to cry, and he didn’t even know why.

He did know why, though, he did. He just hated it and didn’t want to admit it, and he continued not to while he continued to cry until he fell into a fitful sleep exactly as he fell.


	4. Even If It's Not True

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wishes he wasn't an overthinker. He wishes he could turn it off. Instead, it's alive, and it's tearing him to shreds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your responses to the previous chapter! It was something I was nervous to write about and post, but it seems I've managed to do an alright job of telling the story thus far. 
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter are the details of the direct aftermath, which involves some flashing back and deep introspection.

_     U coming back in tomorrow? _

  
  


Craig could scroll through all the text messages between him and Tweek in approximately thirty seconds. He did so often, actually, in idle moments when he was bored and feeling particularly down on himself and sentimental at the same time. Texts about school projects, homework from shared classes, and notices that he was currently idling in his driveway at 3 AM on a weeknight were all that he had to go by. He had no pictures with Tweek, or meaningful conversations to save, cherish. The closest he got was the memory of a time they got high in a field at a bonfire. It was just weed, which was probably its own blessing, considering all the other shit they could have gotten up to. 

Tweek had said, “You know, I think you would make a good mathematician. Or a model.”

The prospect had been so preposterous that Craig had laughed, in that giggly, drawn-out, high sort of way. “They’re so different,” he mused, and continued to think about to this day.

“Yeah, but you could,” Tweek insisted, and that stuck with him ever since.

If Tweek could believe in him about something, it meant he could believe in himself, so he got a tutor and aced trigonometry that year. He ignored the second one.

He remembered all this because the text message where Tweek had said he would be picking him up was in the middle of his scrolling. Fifteen seconds into two years since he got Tweek’s number.

 

_     Bonfires suck. I brought smth chill. Im in ur driveway, btw. _

 

In that text, Craig could feel everything he’d ever thought about Tweek. That he was spontaneous, careless. He was hedonistic, recklessly so. He didn’t care about bonfires, or anybody except for who he focused on in the moment. They were the things he loved about Tweek,  _ loved. _

This newest text felt like a personal one though, and he  _ hated _ it.

 

_     U coming back in tomorrow? _

 

Sent  _ “Today, 8:36 AM.” _ He’d read it from under his covers, the warmth of his blankets interrupted by the chilly wave of nausea that overwhelmed him seeing  _ Tweek Tweak  _ on the lockscreen of his phone.

He never asked off from school, so his mom didn’t ask why beyond the grunt he gave for an answer. He was grateful for that, at least. He wasn’t sure he could really explain what he was feeling, except that it felt really bad.

Craig adjusted his earbud where it got misaligned from his ear against his bedsheets, having forgone the pillow, and stared at the screen of his phone while it sang him a lullaby. He watched the seconds pass in the steadily sliding circle of each song start to end, and tried not to skip any. He was barely listening anyway. He didn’t get out of bed unless absolutely necessary because moving hurt, and being reminded of the aching in his body just made him feel worse.

That text message implied that Tweek had looked for him today. It made Craig feel both an uncomfortable twisting in his gut and a flicker of anger in his chest. As though Tweek had any right to look for him, after yesterday.

He didn’t answer it. Instead, he answered the text he got from Clyde asking if he was okay and if he needed to hang, and while ordinarily Craig would be grateful for his reaching out and accept the offer, nothing about him felt okay enough to do that. He’d prefer not to interact with any of humanity today, friend or not. At least not physically.

 

_     U coming back in tomorrow? _

 

Fuck off Tweek. I can’t even look at you. You’re fucked up, you know that? Fuck you.

It’s what Craig was thinking, anyway, even if he didn’t have the balls to actually text him back. He heaved a sigh, felt the aching of his ribs as the air left his lungs painstakingly slow, and shut his phone off with a click so that he was plunged back into relative darkness swaddled in his blankets. Here, in his own bedsheets, Craig felt safe. Except for when he remembered the text, though. That made him feel  _ extraordinarily _ unsafe.

Tweek was unsafe now, and it was his own stupid fault for blindly going along with something in the first place.

 

* * *

 

Eventually, Craig had gotten bored of staring at nothing, and got up to sit at his computer. As he scrolled through twitter and instagram, he flipped one of the tassles on his worn out blue hat, retrieved from the furthest corner of his closet. It didn’t really fit him properly anymore, but he still kept the old thing around; he’d been a bit mystified that it was authentically Peruvian when he got it, and sometimes in his weaker moments he could be found wearing it. As it was now, Craig felt as though he never wanted to leave its comfort again.

Sitting in the computer chair stung in a way Craig was mostly unfamiliar, but for some sick reason, he welcomed the pain. It was like a personal punishment and private shaming, a finger pointed at his chest saying  _ ‘You did this to yourself,’ _ reminding him of his humility. It also just made him sadder, to feel the remnants of what had turned his entire day—and probably life—upside down. So, after maybe another hour of mindless scrolling through social media and news sites, he sighed, put his computer to sleep, and dragged himself back into bed. He saw no reason to respond to his mother’s distant calling up the stairs that dinner was ready. He wasn’t the slightest bit hungry, overcome with nausea on and off. She’d come by eventually to nag him, so why go to her?

He curled up on his side, returning to his phone dutifully waiting for him with the headphones still plugged in. The sun was on its way down, with the light coming in between his blinds changing color to something orangey-red. He always liked when the sunset shined in through his window, because it illuminated the scrap metal rockets hung from his ceiling. He usually imagined them lifting off, the flame and smoke billowing around them and jetting them into a new adventure. Tonight though, he imagined them landing, sunlight representing the sparks flying from their heat shields as they hurtled for Earth.

They would eventually land in the ocean and then they would sink, miles and miles down from the surface to where no light touched at all, and plant themselves with whatever monstrous creatures might lurk in those waters. In some ways, the ocean was a little scarier than space. At least space’s unknowns were far away.

Craig made a big yawn and tucked his earbuds in, not bothering to take off his hat, and set it to shuffle his insomnia playlist. Instantly, his ears were met with gentle singing and plucked guitar strings, and it made his eyelids droop over his reddened, swollen eyes.

His mind was far from rest, however, as every time he gave it a moment of freedom, it jumped to last night. It jumped to rough hands on his hips, hitting his face, pulling his hair, and he wished it would go away but it felt like a never-ending nightmare. He remembered them, felt them, and yet his body did not move. It wasn’t paralysis so much as a refusal, his own tiny fight against the scratching, grabbing hands scrabbling all over his body. No, he would stay still, and the hands would have no power over him, and for the first time since last night, Craig would have autonomy again.

He wished he wouldn’t. He wished he didn’t have to feel hands in the first place, but here he was anyway. He wished a lot of things that didn’t come true.

He needed a shower.

A light knocking hit the wall beside his door and he jumped, sitting upright too quickly so that his head felt bobbly and his skin paled a pasty white.

“You gonna eat something tonight?” It was just Mom. Craig relaxed his tensed shoulders.

“No,” Craig croaked, realizing very suddenly that he hadn’t spoken a word aloud today, and his voice felt like he hadn’t used it in years.

“I made a plate,” she said through the door, “so eat whenever.”

Craig hummed his response, and he heard the sound of her light footsteps ease down the hall to his parents’ bedroom.

It was a classic Tucker family distant show of affection.  _ “Eat whenever” _ was a silent  _ “I love you.” _ Craig cracked a smile, again, the first all day, and he felt his soul form slowly re-align with his physical form. The dissociation began to fade, but with the fading came the fatal punch of emotions straight to the sternum that made Craig’s skin crawl again.

He  _ really  _ needed a shower. Desperately.

Tricia asked if he was okay in the hallway, another  _ “I love you,” _ and he forced himself to say yes out loud. Tricia obviously didn’t believe him, judging by the knowing stare that she gave him, but she eventually shrugged and shut the door to her room, already on a video call with half her friends.

Turning the knob and feeling the first jet of cold water hit his hand was soothing in a way nothing really had been yet, and he took a deep breath in and out, his eyes closed. The water eventually got hot and he stepped in, and he let it make his skin swell as fiery water turned his back a bright red. He grabbed the soap and his washcloth and began to wash away the hands that still touched him, scrubbing violently on his thighs and hips to try to erase the bruises. They wouldn’t erase, however, and  _ nothing _ really would erase them,  _ forever, _ and Craig’s life felt over,  _ absolutely over, _ and he sat down in the shower and cried.

Really cried, too. The kind he had to force himself not to audibly sob to. The kind the shower water would wash away immediately but would still sting in his eyes. He lifted his head so that his face was assaulted with molten water, letting it clear away the salt and splash his face back to life, but all it did was make it red to match his back.

At least it wasn’t black and blue. At least it wasn’t the imprints of fingertips with poorly clipped nails.

God, what was he doing?

_ Idiot;  _ a voiceless word that still managed to echo through his head.  _ Idiot. _

Why was he crying?

 

* * *

 

It wasn’t until he calmed down, put on new pajamas, and got back into bed that he realized he was terrified of going to school the next morning.  _ Terrified. _ It wasn’t an emotion he really knew how to deal with.

Sure, he’d been scared of getting in trouble before, or final exams, the odd presentation or two, but this was different. This was a new kind of scared. It mixed with nausea and the feeling that if he tried to touch his soul right now, it would plummet away from his fingertips deep into the ground. It was that pulling, numbing sensation that made him feel inhuman. Like an alien in some movie, or one that Tweek made up —

It clicked: he was terrified of Tweek. Maybe not Tweek himself though, and maybe just his feelings, but still. He’d spent the better half of his high school career in love with the guy, but now? Now, Craig was afraid that he didn’t know how he felt about him anymore.

He was afraid of that instability.

As agonizing as it had been at the time, at least his crush had been consistent, ever-present, a part of him. That part of him felt all mixed up now, words in the sand messed up by the sea so that they were nearly illegible, but still there. The shapes were the same, and you could kind of make it out, but the clarity was gone, and just like that the clarity was gone from Craig too.

Did he love Tweek anymore? The  _ I don’t know _ deep in his bones frightened him.

Craig fell asleep that way, with  _ I don’t know _ echoing alongside  _ idiot _ to make his mindscape a living hell. His insomnia playlist, as gentle as it was, did absolutely nothing helpful but keep him from remembering the sounds too. He felt the hands pull his hips back over and over again, expecting to get tugged off the end of his bed every time but never moving an inch, and no matter how tightly he screwed his eyes shut or gripped his forearms, the feeling in his chest wouldn’t go away.

He woke up to his mother banging on his door again, and when the feelings rushed back into his blank canvas of a mood, his soul made friends with the worms in the dirt. At least sitting wasn’t hurting as much anymore. He didn’t make eye contact with a single living soul all morning, all through his bus ride and his first period and his second and third and fourth, but.

Lunch time came, and the first eyes he saw that day were vivid, green and happy to see him, and everything about Craig crumpled into itself like a scrapped notebook page; tossed to the garbage only to miss the mark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know what you think if you've got a moment!


	5. Collapsing Star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The panic attack is one of God's worst inventions, probably.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I'm going kinda fast with this story, but it's just sorta pouring out at this point, and I don't want to stifle my creative vision by slowing down! I hope you're following along and 'enjoying' the ride as much as I am. Thank you to everyone who left me kind words on the previous chapter as well!

There was not a single thing Craig could think of in the whole universe that could have prepared him for the emotions that assaulted his very essence at the sight of those eyes. He couldn’t quite put his finger on everything he was feeling either, as it created a dissonance so strong and shattering that he was rendered to numbness. As though his ears had been blown out, his vision tunneled and extremities buzzing like a major trauma patient in need of a blood transfusion. It certainly felt like he needed one too, with how weak he went, how pale he got, the light sweat just above the cupid’s bow of his lip signifying an imminent wave of nausea and dizziness. 

Everything else came to a halt within him, all around him, and the eyes got closer.

His body wanted him to run. It wanted him to hide, disappear, melt away the way he wished he could, but his mind didn’t have the cognitive awareness to act. Instead, he was frozen in place at his locker, hanging onto the creaky door so he wouldn’t fall over, like his life depended on it.

What felt like hours was probably only seconds, watching him strut toward him with all the confidence he ever had before. He was so attracted to that confidence, used to sigh about it like it was some unattainable perfection, and for what now, the torture of knowing a different side of him? The worst part was probably that he was confident  _ there,  _ too, in ways he hadn’t expected.

The hand whose print fit perfectly on the burnt imprint in his cheek touched his arm, and he jerked backwards like it’d burned him there, too. Tweek cocked his head with a weirded out, confused look on his face, but he otherwise shook it off. Craig just shook. He prayed he wasn’t shaking as much as he felt like he was.

“Hey dude, why didn’t you answer my text?”

Normal, his voice was normal. So unaffected, scratchy and odd, higher than he remembered- this wasn’t the same one he was afraid of. For some reason that, coupled with the fact that up close he could see that his eyes looked like he was sober, made him relax a little. Just a little.

“I didn’t feel good.”

“I mean, yeah,” Tweek said, clearly uncomfortable, but Craig didn’t care much how uncomfortable he was. He was sure his own discomfort was ten times worse, and it had made itself a home with a boiling pit of anger in his gut that he couldn’t figure out how to express. Instead, all he had was his stone cold glare, which he somehow was able to keep on his face despite the fact he felt like he might be either floating away or dying, maybe both.

“I was just gonna ask I guess if you were okay,” Tweek continued, not waiting for the awkward pause between them to get interrupted by anything else, “since you, ah, s-since you weren’t here. Clyde said you answered him.”

“You talked to Clyde?” Craig asked, perking up at the new information, and Tweek nodded slowly. That was weird- Tweek didn’t talk to Clyde. Clyde didn’t mention that either.  _ That _ was weirder.

“Yeah, I wanted to talk to you. Y’know, about Wednesday?”

Ah, Wednesday.

He flinched. He didn’t think that Tweek noticed.

“Yeah?” he asked, even though he had no intention of talking about Wednesday,  _ at all, _ and would frankly rather it disappear from history altogether.

“Yeah, I dunno,” Tweek looked away from him, his eyes darting down to the frayed hem of his shirt that he’d clearly wrung together enough times to make the corner a wrinkled mess. “You were kinda weird.”

“Was I?”

“Yeah! I mean, I was weird too, but, uh-” he struggled with what to say, the frustration mounting in his face, and Craig just watched it. “Dude, w-what’s your problem?”

Craig’s slow ascent into the clouds was halted, and he got slammed back into his body in one fell swoop. He blinked to bring his eyes back into focus. “Excuse me?”

“Why are you being—being weird?”

“I’m being weird?”

“Yes!” Tweek snarled out his frustration, and just like that, Craig was back to complete and utter terror. The voice had returned, and his aggression too, and Craig did everything in his power to make himself small, far beyond his own control. “Quit answering my questions with questions!”

Tweek inched just the tiniest bit closer and Craig leaned the furthest bit back, falling back into his still-open locker and struggling to keep himself upright in the process. Just like that, though, Tweek snapped out of his mood, and he stood up straight. “You okay dude-”

“Fine, I’m fine,” Craig grit out, and he turned and slammed his locker shut in a flash, shouldering past him and avoiding the people in the crowd with as much precision as he was capable on knocking knees. He might have heard Tweek calling after him in all the shuffling, but he chose to ignore it. He powered forward, his target the nearest empty hole in the wall. Where was the nearest bathroom? That was close enough, anyway.

He nearly missed the stairwell and hopped down each step at the same lightning speed as the people in front of and behind him. When he got down to the basement he took a left, and another left into the singular accessible bathroom next to the locker rooms. He shoved the door closed faster than its automatic closing system could manage and twisted the lock over, and froze exactly there, hand still poised on the metal switch.

For a moment he tried to focus on breathing, but as soon as he realized that wasn’t happening right, it was a massive downward spiral from there. He twirled around and leaned against the door, his lungs feeling perpetually empty and his throat on fire from the attempts to fill them. He reached for the grab bar and slid down against his backpack, the other hand scratching at his chest like he could somehow get his ribcage to expand or his heart to stop fucking pounding by force. Scratching and scratching, and breaths heaving, sweat pooling and hands,  _ hands _ deep in his hips and on his face and all over his naked skin—

He coughed and dragged in a haggard breath that felt like knives in his chest, starving for oxygen he couldn’t deliver. He thumped the back of his skull against the door and stared up into the lights in the ceiling, and he entertained the thought of dying here. Rest in peace Craig Tucker, tragically suffocated on absolutely nothing in a dirty school bathroom. The epitaph sounded so pathetic it made him laugh a bit, though it was more like a fragmented wheeze.

In that wheeze, he gained a little of the ability to think properly back. His breathing was still rattly and weird, but at least felt like it was working, and his bones didn’t feel like they were going to shake out of his skin. He felt like he’d just run a mile in five minutes, panting and sweating and exhausted. He closed his eyes, the lights little suns in the back of his eyes, and he listened to the blood rush through his veins and the air cycle through his chest.

He didn’t know how long he spent there, letting his body calm itself and the energy slowly return to his limbs. He eventually opened his eyes once he worried he would possibly fall asleep where he sat, and accidentally blinded himself on the lights overhead. He blinked rapidly and rubbed at his eyes, which was when he realized he’d been crying too.

“Whoa…” he mumbled, and he let out a couple weak coughs when it scratched up his throat. He swore and pulled himself to his feet by the bar he’d been previously clinging to, and stumbled to the sink to get the water running. He cupped water in his hands and took the deepest sips he could manage and suddenly he was thirsty as hell, and then he remembered it was supposed to be his lunch period.

He wiped the excess water on his hands over his face and dried it off with his sleeve, and went hunting for his cell phone. He swore again- he must have left it in his locker. He was pretty sure he hadn’t heard another bell ring, but he had no idea from within the walls of this isolated single bathroom. He went through a couple practice-runs on his breathing, and when he decided it worked well enough, he braced himself and shoved out of the bathroom.

Before he fully turned the corner, he thought to consider that Tweek might  _ still _ be there, and all over again his heart started beating like no tomorrow. He brought a hand to it, to try containing it this time instead of freeing it, and after a couple inhales and exhales, he breathed in sharply to round the entryway.

He exhaled in a giant sigh of relief when he found his locker, and the entire associated area it sat in, appropriately empty. He’d left his phone on the top shelf, and when he pulled it down, he saw there were two texts, one from Clyde and one from Token, waiting for him. They were probably annoyed at him for supposedly ditching. He swore a third time, and opened them up quickly to confirm his suspicions while he headed for the cafeteria.

The whole way there, he contemplated what had just happened in the bathroom: if he should tell anybody, if it was okay, who could maybe help so that it didn’t happen again. He’d never felt something so intensely scary in his life, and that was including the whirlwind of hurt and bullshit of the past couple days. Ultimately, as he tried to sneak into the cafeteria unnoticed, he decided to do what he always did- bury it and hope it went away.

He was thankful his friends sat off to the side usually anyway. “Hey dude, what the fuck?” Clyde yelled over at him, but nothing about him screamed actual irritation, so Craig knew he was still in the clear.

He waited until he got closer, and said, “Sorry. Ran into Tweek.”

“Ohoh?” Jimmy teased, his eyebrow up and his grin teasing, and Craig wished it didn’t hurt so much to see that. He wished it didn’t hurt so much to get reminded of his… crush? Was he still?

Jimmy must have noticed his lack of an immediate flustered response, so he dropped the smirk and got the same look of confused concern that all his other friends had.

“Yeah,” was all the explanation he was willing to give, and he forced Token to scoot in on the bench so he could take the outer seat. He stole fries from Clyde’s plate without asking, which usually garnered some sort of outrage, but for some reason all he got was more concerned silence. It was starting to piss him off.

“Look,” he said, and he dropped his hands on the table a little harder than necessary, to make a thudding sound that shook the table and made Clyde gasp, “everybody’s been acting fuck-weird all fucking day, and I  _ need _ you assholes to just—” his eyes darted from face to face, getting even more pissed off with their worried looks “—like, fuck around like normal. Please? Just lay off and get mad at Jimmy for making a dumbass joke, like, Jesus.” His voice continued to die in his throat as he spoke until he was mumbling into his hoodie sleeve, his chin having slowly descended onto the table. His throat still hurt.

“Uh… Yeah, guys, let’s lay off.” Token suggested, and as Clyde and Jimmy agreed and hopped off into another stupid bout of dumbass arguing, his eyes stayed on Craig a little too long.

Craig didn’t like the way it looked, that stare, even from down at the table’s surface. “What?” he hissed, and finally Token took his eyes off him, shaking his head instead.

“Nothing dude, just like, you can talk to me whenever okay?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Craig challenged, instantly defensive, but Token just shrugged at him.

“I dunno, just a feeling.”

And with that, he left him alone too. He kind of wished he hadn’t. He was all sorts of worried about what the hell Token was picking up on that he was probably trying to hide. Was he not as good of an actor as he thought? Or at least not aggressive enough to deter him? Fuck.

Some part of Craig appreciated it though, even though he didn’t want Token getting any ideas, so he nudged him subtly out of affection. Token returned it, harder than him, and he cracked a smile, after what felt like decades.

At least he had these guys, Craig thought, as he watched them go through the motions of their bullshit from the table’s surface. And they were, admittedly, pretty great.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let me know your thoughts if you have a moment! Also, in case you didn't know, my tumblr is blame-canada if you wanna chat or give my blog a quick look (warning: it's mostly Creek reblogs)!


	6. A Dying Breed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kenny.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank everyone who has been supporting the fic so far! It's meant a lot to me, and I've worked very hard on writing something worth reading. I hope you enjoy this installment too.

The rest of Craig’s Friday passed without incident, and luckily, by the time he got home and alone in his room, he started getting his appetite back. Some of his irritability may have been spurred by the low blood sugar, or something. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days, and his stomach remembered it harshly. 

The relief that it was officially the weekend was mixed with uncomfortable nervousness. He was glad to be left alone for a couple days, but at the same time, he was worried to be left alone. It wasn’t in a suicidal sort of way, that he was afraid he might do something to himself, but more so that he was afraid to be alone with his thoughts the way he was on Thursday. He remembered how rampant they were, rowdy and overpowering in his head, and he didn’t really want to spend another 48 hours that way. Maybe he could try to spread out his homework, occupy his mind somehow.

He hopped down the stairs two at a time to swing around the end of the banister and sling himself into the kitchen, and continued the momentum to reach the fridge door and pull it open. With little resistance it popped open, and he began his hunt for snacks. This was a well-oiled machine, an age old practice, and one he’d mastered since the age of nine. He went for the applesauce, guessing there was probably some sugar in it, and peeled back the lid to eat it right where he stood, leaning back against the counter.

As he fed himself spoonfuls of sweetened mush (he wasn’t actually a big fan of applesauce, but it was sustenance), he stared at the cracks in the floor’s tiles. His mom hated this floor. She’d been meaning to get it replaced for years and years and never really done it, so it stayed in all its ugly orangey glory. Craig had to agree that it was pretty awful.

Something in his head clicked then, as he dropped his used spoon in the sink—his thoughts  _ weren’t  _ overwhelmed. He wasn’t thinking about the hands or the angry voices or the pain. His train of thought had been normal the entire way here, from his bedroom to the staircase to the kitchen. For a moment, his brain had been  _ free, _ and he didn’t even notice.

In that realization, Craig felt that maybe,  _ maybe, _ he’d end up okay. Maybe hands would fade and scars too, and he’d be back here, eating fruit cups and other kid snacks in the kitchen thinking about how he didn’t like half the things he was experiencing at that moment, and that half would be wonderfully meaningless.

“You okay?” a voice suddenly slurred, and he looked up from the ugly floor to his sister’s unamused expression.

“Since when do you care?” he bit back, entirely on instinct, and Tricia scoffed.

“Whatever,” she muttered, and she ran past him to get to the staircase and up to her room. Before her bedroom door inevitably slammed, however, she yelled down from the railing, “Tell Mom I’m on the phone!”

Craig rolled his eyes, shouted a quick “A’ight!” and sighed at the same time that her door smacked shut. A little smile crept its way to his lips though, recalling the conversation that had just happened—normal,  _ normal. _

As he took the steps too fast and got back to the comfort of his bed, he thanked God for normal.

 

* * *

 

Craig luckily managed to get a decent amount of sleep Friday night, able to distract himself from thinking too much with video games and benadryl, but still found himself sleeping in until almost noon (probably because of the benadryl). His mother banged on his door to get him up and he yelled back at her,  _ “Shut up mom I’m fucking awake!” _ even though he was definitely not awake. He yawned and snuggled into his blankets, holding onto the last bits of warmth as long as he could manage, and reached under his pillow for his phone.

He paused before he unlocked it. On the lock screen was a text notification from a phone number he didn’t have a contact saved for. He tried thinking of who it could possibly be but came up empty. With a head full of possibilities and almost none of them good, he unlocked his phone with his fingerprint and opened up his messages.

_    hey Craig its kenny. idk if u have my number nd hopefully this is still yours. wanted to know if we could talk. _

Well. Of the possibilities, he had to say this wasn’t high up on the ones he thought of right away, or at all. He dropped his phone back on his bed and groaned, rubbing his palms into his eyes and his fingers into his forehead. He wrinkled his nose at how greasy his skin felt, and wiped it off on the end of his blankets.

Before he gathered the courage to get out of bed, he stared at the message even longer. Should he message him back? At least tell him that he had the right number? What did he want to talk about? The only connection he could even come up with was—

Craig’s stomach turned, and he closed his eyes and dropped his face into his bed with another groan. All at once, before the day even started, he got jolted back into feeling like complete garbage. God, he didn’t know how long he could keep up with this, this constant switching from fine to completely not-fine. It was exhausting. He wished the hurt would just fade already, more like a little papercut than the gaping wound it was, but maybe that was wishful thinking. As he couldn’t come up with an answer right away, he decided to just fight the nausea, roll out of bed, and get in the shower first.

While he stood in the water, he was confronted with his feelings about Kenny. Somehow, they weren’t as strong as they were about Tweek, despite the fact that they were equally a part of what happened. Where he was furious at Tweek, his anger toward Kenny was hardly a flicker in comparison. He didn’t know what to make of that, except that maybe because Tweek had meant so much to him, his offense hurt that much worse. Kenny was just… an accomplice, somewhat. Guilty, but not the main offender. At least not to him, or his brain.

When he got back to his room, he had basically made up his mind, and tapped out a response quickly.

_    Hey. Why? _

He was never very good with confrontation.

By the time he was dressed, he’d gotten a response back.

_    its ab the other night. can we meet in person _

A little twinge of fear twisted at the corner of Craig’s heart, confirming his suspicions, but he willed it away.

_   Where? _

_    by my house at the tracks if u can. Ill be here so just txt me if u are up to it/here _

Craig stared at that message for a while. The pause menu of the video game he was idly picking at was playing a nondescript song at him in the background while he took it in. He sounded serious, which Craig wouldn’t’ve pegged Kenny for regularly being. A quick glance at the time told him it was still only about one, which meant he had a lot of time in the afternoon to go before his mom started asking questions. He let out a quick breath, and saved the game while he pulled on his socks.

 

* * *

 

The tracks weren’t far from his own house, so he didn’t have to account for any more than ten minutes to get there. The problem was much more so with the place itself. It was about halfway through the route that he was reminded of the last time he took this journey, and it made him shiver unrelated to the weather. He’d been so happy. Nervous, but  _ happy. _ And while before he probably would’ve laughed at himself for being happy about going to Kenny’s dirty little house, now he had absolutely nothing to laugh about.

What he remembered now though, as he rounded the last corner, was not what it looked like on his way there but what it looked like late into the night, lit by half the streetlights it was supposed to have. It was only a few days ago but felt like forever, like he was retracing a thousand year journey, a thousand years later—like it was more momentous than any actual, realistic passage of time could define. He remembered the dark, the chill, the pain on his body and in his steps. His memories only got stronger the closer he got to the darkened bedroom he could never quite scrub from his eyes since.

At least he didn’t have to go in  _ there. _

Craig pulled out his phone and opened up their brief text history again, to let Kenny know that he was here. There was still a bit of distance he could stand to cross to get closer, but he really didn’t feel like crossing it. Kenny answered him almost immediately, saying he would be there in a few minutes, and Craig took a deep breath in, deep breath out.

Why was he afraid? It wasn’t Tweek. It wasn’t the same. Still, something about this felt terrifying, and the only solace he could find was that, should he need to, there were plenty of ways to run away. He sounded pathetic, Jesus Christ. Kenny wasn’t really a threat like that,  _ exactly, _ but the thought was still a bit comforting when combating the amount of pure anxiety balled up in his chest over meeting up with him at all. He almost wished it could happen in the crowded halls of the high school instead of out here in the near-silence, save for the sounds of birds and wind chimes on a nearby porch.

Craig saw Kenny coming long before he got up close, which he supposed was helpful in that it gave him time to try to relax and think through what he was going to do. Kenny wanted to talk, and he was fine with that, but he really didn’t know what there was to say. Maybe Kenny just wanted a round two, and was trying to preposition him with a bedroom already waiting. His stomach churned at that thought, thoroughly disgusted. He stopped trying to come up with answers when Kenny only had to cross the tracks before he’d be right there in front of him.

“Hey,” Kenny called out. He walked up closer to him but without getting too close, which Craig appreciated.

“Hey,” Craig answered with a nod, and Kenny only looked at him for a second before very deliberately looking away, into the gravel under their shoes.

“Hey, uh, so,” he repeated, but before he started to talk any more than that, he seemed too caught up in his own internal conflicts. His brow was screwed up, his lower lip was sucked into his mouth and bitten, and his hands were picking at each other from under the sleeves of his jacket. “Fuck,” he started again, this time with a little laugh, “I’m no good at this shit, dude.”

“What shit?”

Kenny looked up at him again for just a second, almost too quick for Craig to see, but just enough to make the whites of his eyes known from under the fringe of his bad haircut. “Straight to the point, huh,” he mumbled, and Craig shrugged. Truthfully, he just wanted to get this over with, so he could go back to numbly pretending this past week wasn’t real and ignoring Kenny altogether.

“I jus’, I dunno. I wanted to talk to you in person, not on a screen.” He cleared his throat. The awkwardness between them could be cut with a goddamn knife.

“What is there to talk about?” Craig asked, and he meant it.

“I just… had something to say.”

Craig blinked. There wasn’t much he could do with that. Kenny was stalling. “Shoot.”

“Well.” Kenny scratched at his head. “I think I fucked up.”

Craig blurted his answer out, before he could kick himself for thinking it: “You think?”

Kenny looked up at him and for a moment, Craig could see something like fear in  _ his _ eyes. Then, he closed them, and after a heavy exhale, he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, think I did.”

Craig didn’t say anything immediately. He grunted his acknowledgement that he’d at least heard him, but had no words. He was still processing Kenny’s, after all, because really, Craig wasn’t sure how to do this either. He wasn’t sure what to say when someone came to him to  _ actually admit _ to having made a mistake, and own up to it, because no one had ever done something like that for him before, not seriously. How odd too, that it’d be coming from someone whose phone number he didn’t even have. Someone he barely knew.

Curiosity at what trouble was coursing through Kenny’s veins fueled him, inspired him to respond at all. “Why?” he asked, and Kenny blinked up at him.

“You weren’t okay”—Kenny shook his head—“and I shoulda done more. I shouldn’t’a tossed you out like I did.”

There was a long enough pause that Craig wondered if Kenny was expecting a response, but all he gave him was, “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Kenny came back, quickly. “I wasn’t bein’ a good partner at all. I shoulda known better. I  _ do _ know better, I just…” he trailed off, and sighed. “I wasn’t payin’ attention. I didn’t treat you right. I know we’re not dating or anything, but, that doesn’t really matter. I shoulda paid attention.”

Craig found himself speechless, after that. There weren’t words he could come up with to describe exactly how he was feeling. His thoughts were deathly slow but his heart was beating out of his chest. In front of him, licking his lips nervously and shuffling over tiny rocks, was a man who’d made himself vulnerable, willingly, for him. While that in itself was nice, appreciated and almost pleasant, the contrast it put in his heart was searing.

He had two voices to compare.

_ “Dude, w-what’s your problem?” _

_ “I think I fucked up.” _

It sucked, so goddamn much, that the answer he wanted hadn’t come from the right people.

“You okay?” Kenny asked, pulling Craig from his thoughts, and he blinked rapidly back into the present. Kenny was looking at him properly now, his gaze concerned and genuine, and Craig struggled to keep eye contact with something so sincere.

“Yeah,” Craig rasped, “I-I’m okay.” Anxiety mounted in his chest as Kenny’s hand reached for him, snagging his sleeve, tugging it gently—

“Dude, are you sure? You’re like, fuckin’ shakin’ an’-”

“Fucking _ stop,” _ he barked, and Kenny snatched his arm back, standing up straight and looking suddenly as nervous as Craig felt. He tried not to focus on the way his breath rattled in his lungs, tried to separate it from its startling similarity to yesterday in the bathroom, and wheezed through a laugh. “You know, you’re fucking right. Like, you’re not talking outta your ass, right? Because you did fuck up.” The way Kenny’s eyes were alight with fear gave him a sick sense of satisfaction, rooted in the feeling of needing even the slightest amount of power.

“I know, dude.” Kenny took a small step back—smart—but didn’t once back down from his eyes. “I mean… God, Craig, I’m sorry. Did I say that yet? Fuck.” He kicked at the gravel, spraying rocks from under his toes. The wind chimes tinged on behind them. “I’m just… so fucking sorry, Craig.”

_ Sorry. _

‘Sorry’ was not something Craig expected to hear, not in a million years. But hearing it just then, with complete clarity and sincerity, made it so fucking difficult not to start crying on the spot.  _ ‘You should be!’ _ he wanted to yell, almost needed to, but he had to focus on not letting tears fall from his eyes more than he had to worry about saying anything back first. To save face, in case he failed, he turned away from him entirely, and stared up into the clouds that passed lazily overhead.

“Um… Is there anything I can do?” Kenny asked, quietly, and Craig let out a short, humorless laugh.

“No,” he said, truthfully.

A small part of Craig hoped that would scare Kenny off, but Kenny didn’t budge. He stayed exactly in place, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, and waited. Craig left him that way for a long time too, while he thought.

What did he want to do? Kenny was at his mercy, right in front of him, but what exactly did he want to do with that power, now that he had it? Would it make him feel better if he got into a fight, punched Kenny’s lights out, caused a scene for an imaginary crowd out at the railroad tracks? It might feel good, he decided, stretching his fingers in and out of a fist, but would it even matter? Smart Craig said it wouldn’t take Wednesday away, just like ignoring it wouldn’t either.

He sighed. As he let that air out slowly, he turned back toward Kenny, who was clearly waiting for him while he fucked around in his head.

“Thanks for apologizing,” he said. He meant it too, meant it very purely, because deep in his heart he knew he shouldn’t expect the same from the other half of the offenders at large. No, deep in there, Craig knew which of them was the more mature person. Always had.

“You deserve a whole lot more,” Kenny admitted with a shrug. “Just like, let me know what I can do, a’ight? D’you want me to leave you alone or what?”

“Kinda,” Craig admitted, and though he sensed that wasn’t the answer Kenny was hoping for, it was the answer he was gonna get. “At least for a little while.”

Kenny closed his eyes and sighed. He ran a hand through his hair once, twice, three times over, and didn’t open them back up until he was done with that too. “Yeah, alright,” he said, his voice solemn but understanding. “Lemme know if there’s anythin’ else in the future though, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Craig said, “thanks.”

With that, Kenny saluted him, and looked both ways before crossing the railroad tracks away from him. Craig turned around in kind and started walking back home too, but paused when he heard Kenny yell out an “Ay, wait, Craig!”

He turned to see Kenny with his hands cupped around his mouth. “Yeah?” he yelled back, and Kenny jogged the couple of strides back to Craig’s side.

“I jus’ wanted to warn ya, before you got yourself there, uh.” Kenny stopped himself.

“Out with it, asshole.”

“Ahah, jus’ like normal then already, huh?” Kenny joked, but when Craig didn’t reply, he sobered up quick, realizing his error. They were nowhere near ‘normal,’ and Craig refused to shy away from that. “I jus’ wanted to warn ya not to be lookin’ for the same shit outta Tweek.”

Craig’s whole body froze at the name alone. He still didn’t say anything.

“Look,” Kenny sighed, “Tweek is somethin’ special. Not always in a good way, y’know. I don’t think he’s gonna have the awareness to really… think, about all this. He’s not gonna get it.” He shook his head. “Tweek’s got some problems dude, ‘s’all.”

“He didn’t seem to have any problem forcing his cock down my throat and up my ass, huh,” Craig bit, and Kenny winced just as Craig winced internally at his own harshness. It still felt good to be mean about it though.

“Y-yeah, I know, but like. He’s just an idiot, alright? I don’t think he’s any less wrong than I am, but can ya listen to this at least? I’m sorry for bringin’ that back up to mind, I’m sorry, but listen—I just don’t think Tweek is gonna see that he’s wrong, not for a while.”

Deep down, smart Craig knew that was right.

“And… And I don’t want you to think that because of that, you’re not justified.”

None of Craig knew that, though, not for sure, and so all his bodily mechanisms came to an abrupt stop.

Words didn’t really want to flow and neither did his muscles, and so he stood there next to Kenny without a single word to say to him, even after all that. Kenny didn’t seem to hold it against him, because he just said, “Take care, dude,” and then he was gone for real.

Craig didn’t move from that spot for another five minutes, uninterrupted. The wind chimes beckoned him home.

That night, Craig found himself lying in bed staring at his ceiling, buzzing with the thoughts that Kenny had the audacity to put spinning in between his ears. He watched the subtle swinging of his rockets hanging from fishing line, and failed to make any of those thoughts make collective sense. Kenny had apologized, and that counted for something. And he hadn’t been an asshole about it either, or made it hard to pull out of him. He’d come to him on his own to do it, and been shockingly real to him.

He tried to bury the way Tweek had treated him yesterday as far away from his mind as possible and instead focus on what Kenny had said today, but all it did was solidify the differences between them. As Craig lied there, the only movement in his body the blinking of his eyelids and the fluttering of his heart, he tried to piece together what it all meant to him.

Kenny sucked—this Craig knew even before Wednesday, when he knew about him from afar. What was it that had previously set Tweek aside from him though, when they both had equally frustrating, intriguing mindsets? This apology was what laid the map to Kenny out for him, and now Craig felt like he was looking at him differently too, the way he did for Tweek. Maybe though, this wasn’t an entirely bad thing. Maybe Kenny cared about him too, somewhere deep down?

Craig’s next conscious thought was of the streaming of sunlight in on his belly, where his phone was left overnight, and as he started to take in Sunday, he was relieved to find that he had no new numbers with unexpected text messages waiting for him this time.

 

 


	7. Too Good to Be True

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Token.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, welcome to Chapter 7! Thank you as always to everyone who has shown me support so far. I will do all I can not to let you down. Please enjoy what I have next to share with you, and I look forward to seeing you back for the next round!

He didn’t mean to be stereotypical, but Craig really hated Monday today. It wasn’t so much the Monday that he hated however as much as he hated the anticipation, the knowing that the day was a Monday and therefore inherently bad, and that made getting out of bed a struggle. It didn’t help that school was now a war zone either, with two landmines moving freely about the map that Craig just couldn’t avoid. Well, more like a landmine and a half—Craig felt a little better about Kenny, who hadn’t really been the focal point of his distress in the first place, and thinking of his face didn’t make him immediately blanch with nausea. He just didn’t want to talk to him, preferably ever again.

The only thing that brought him comfort seemed to be the promise of seeing his friends, which hadn’t changed much from before—they had always been his lifeline. They had their own conversational merits, too, which Craig liked: Clyde for dumb bro stuff, Token for deep thoughts, Jimmy for laughs. With Craig’s deadpan sarcasm they were an unstoppable chaotic force, and that chaos got him to show up at school most days.

Which was how Craig found himself at the back of the school at lunch, wheeling Clyde around in a stolen cart from the CVS a block away. This was an extremely mild thing to do.

“You guys gotta be real with me right now, like, really real.”

Craig huffed a little laugh through his nose, turning the cart lazily around the figure 8 he was wearing into the broken up, shitty pavement. “Real about what?”

“Like, after we graduate real.”

Craig almost stopped driving. “Yeah?” Token encouraged, but Clyde didn’t have much else to follow up with.

“Yeah! Like, how are we gonna meet up, ‘n’ stuff.” Clyde put his legs up over the edge of the cart, sighing. “We don’t talk about this shit but it’s important, man.”

“Y-you been eating fish sticks lately?” Jimmy quipped, and Clyde growled at him.

“It’s not gay to talk about feelings sometimes, bro,” Token said, easily having put together the indirect joke Jimmy told regularly, and Craig leaned forward on the shopping cart’s handle. The metal put imprints in his chilly arms where they pressed in.

“He’s right. I never talk about my feelings,” Craig added, his inflection flat as a pancake. That, Clyde snickered at.

Token shot him a quick glare, but it wasn’t for real. “Anyway,” he emphasized, “we should actually talk about this. I mean, we know where we’re all going, but we haven’t talked about how we’re gonna come back.”

They group fell silent then, the only sound the squeaking of a bad wheel on the cart. The smoke from some nearby assholes’ cigarettes was wafting in their direction because of the wind, and it made the air stink. It was true, they only had a couple months left of high school, then a couple months of summer, and then the great journey into the unknown of college. None of them were going too far away except for Jimmy, who insisted on finding a school in California. Something about showbiz, Craig couldn’t remember. Then Clyde was off to Denver, a couple hours away, and Token to Boulder, a little further North. Then there was Craig, who’d opted for staying at home an extra two years to go to the Park County Community College, because he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life.

In some ways, the fact that his friends were going to private universities for specific degree paths while he stayed home undecided made him feel kind of stupid. They insisted that wasn’t the case, but still, he couldn’t help but feel like staying in South Park would mean he was glued here, and he’d have an even harder time of leaving once he got his associate’s degree. The thought that he’d  _ never _ know what he wanted to do terrified him, and only made choosing harder. His dad said it was smart to stay at home for cheaper school to start out, and that made sense, but again,  _ still. _

The biggest reason he felt stupid, though, was because half the reason he wanted to stay was because he knew Tweek was too.

Tweek, the source of all his problems right now—the landmine waiting to explode the moment they made eye contact.  _ He _ was half the reason he was staying, and Craig hated himself for being so stupid to do that when they weren’t even dating in the first place.

“Ay Craig, lemme out,” Clyde said, snapping Craig out of his meandering, darkening thoughts, and he pitched the cart forward so that Clyde could tumble out of it. He did so with about as much grace as a baby deer, legs wobbly and crooked, but he gleamed a gigantic smile at him the moment he straightened up. Craig couldn’t help but return it, albeit only slightly.

The bell rang not too long afterward, and they grabbed all their stuff propped up against the school’s cement wall to hike to their next classes. Before Craig could separate completely, however, a hand patted at his arm gently. He whipped his head around, but relaxed the moment he realized it was just Token.

“Hey man, can we talk later?” he asked, and Craig turned to face him fully, confused.

“Yeah, why?”

Token just shook his head a bit then, which only made Craig more nervous. “I’ll text you bro. I figured we could hang out later tonight.”

Craig felt a little excited at the thought, actually, and he smiled at Token in a way that prompted him to smile back, the motion crinkling the skin at the corners of his warm brown eyes. “Yeah, okay,” he answered, and Token nodded before walking away in the opposite direction, but not before giving him another pat on the arm.

Token was a special friend. Craig realized that a long time ago, when they first spent time alone together and he realized that they bonded without even talking to each other, somehow. The simplicity of their relationship hadn’t changed over the years either, and Craig was grateful. He was going to be looking forward to hanging out tonight all day long now, and it put a smile on his face while he walked down the hall. Token hang-outs were the most relaxing, soothing thing sometimes, and he hoped to God he could make that same energy happen tonight too, because fuck did he ever need it, and he hadn’t even realized.

When Craig sat down in his next class and pulled out his notebook to copy down slides full of boring information, he opened up to a random page on accident first. And oh, what an accident it turned out to fucking be.

It was a Tweek page. Worse than little things scribbled in the margins of his notes, even. One of several pieces of paper in his notebooks covered in nothing but words that made him think of Tweek, randomly throughout the day, the week, all-time.

They were all beautiful words, always.

Frustrated,  _ angry, _ Craig rifled back through his backpack to find the black sharpie marker he kept floating at the bottom that he’d stolen from the art room. The page made his mind blank and oily black instead of filling him with flowers, and he hated it,  _ hated it! _

He  _ hated _ Tweek  _ so fucking much _ right now!

Would he always?

With fire in his veins and electricity in his fingers, he gripped the marker tightly and wrote across the entire page in thick, angular letters, as purposefully as he could, so that they’d bleed through to the next goddamn page and cover as many nonsense overly-poetic words as he could manage.

 

**_MONSTER._ **

 

* * *

 

Craig’s mood didn’t improve much after math class, but he was determined to stick it out so that he could attend his requested meeting with Token. It was probably really important, and even important topics didn’t feel like shit with him. Bless him for his uncomplicated friendship.

 

_    When are you free? _

 

Token had texted him immediately after school let out. He was kind of a goody-two-shoes type and didn’t use his phone much during school hours. 

 

_    You know I’m free whenever dude _

 

_    Haha yeah. Ok see you at 7? After dinner? _

 

_    Sounds good. _

 

_    :) _

Dinner had been uneventful, with some side eyes from his parents over his moody inability to actually discuss how he was feeling or how school went. They probably assumed he failed some sort of test, which he’d have to explain not to be the case later—he really didn’t want to get in trouble just for being a dick and keeping his mouth shut. Whatever. There was something much more important going on, and it was Token’s Lexus idling in his driveway.

He told his mom he was going out as he swung down the stairs, and yelled back that it was with Token when she asked. She didn’t ask follow-up questions. She knew enough about his friends to know that Token wouldn’t take him on some wild, illegal joy ride. Probably.

The door clicked open easily and Craig dropped his ass into the leather-tailored passenger seat, and yanked the door back closed with ease. Then he turned to look at Token, who was smiling, but something seemed off. “Where are we going?” Craig asked, and some of that weirdness melted away from his face.

“Just gonna go to the field.”

Ah, the field. A random-ass corn field just outside of town that was a regular location for both drunken parties and for chill times. Also for sex, for the ones interested in crossing “car sex” off the bucket list early. It mostly seemed uncomfortable at best, and Craig had never wanted to try it for himself.

They pulled in about five silent minutes later, and Token put the car in park and put the windows only slightly down before shutting it off. The silence continued for a moment too long, just enough for Craig to ask, “What?”

Token sighed, and he unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned his seat back. Craig copied him, out of habit. “Something seems off with you lately, and I wanted to talk about it.”

Oh, no.

No, no, no.

Craig had two options. He could lie, say everything was fine and he was just sad about them splitting after summer (which was true, and made it only sort of a lie), or he could tell the truth. Or maybe part of the truth, or something. Craig’s anxiety spiked like a knife to his chest, and he swallowed thickly, faced with a decision he really didn’t want to make.

“Do I have to..?” Craig said, quietly, and Token turned his head to look at him. Craig met his eyes, saw his worry lines defined in his brow, and felt immediately guilty.

“I guess not, but that doesn’t really make my worrying any better.”

Craig bit at his lip and picked at his nails and actually tried to dissociate, but the outdoor sounds leaking through the windows and Token’s intent stare were too grounding to let him soar away.

Token reached up and slid the cover to the sunroof back so that they got a perfect window to the sky, halfway to full darkness and hovering in a medium blue. This was how they usually chatted, leaned back and staring at the universe while the stars blinked into view, one by one. It did help Craig feel less nervous, to be in this familiar setting, but still. He didn’t want to feel vulnerable right now. Here though, when it was just him and Token and the freckled sky—it felt like one of the only places he’d ever feel vulnerable enough to say something. So he did.

“Remember last week, how Tweek invited me over?” Craig started, the fear scratching at his throat and making the words hard to speak, and Token nodded slowly, his face deadly serious. “It didn’t go as well as I wish it did.”

“How so?” Token followed up, quickly, and Craig scratched at his wrist, a distraction.

Here goes, he guessed.

As he spoke and recounted what happened in detail that Token insisted was not TMI, his serious face hardly wavered. At times, it morphed to anger, or shock, but for the most part he was calm, and deathly quiet. He listened intently, and Craig poured everything out, like an overflowing cup he didn’t realize needed to spill over. He almost fucking cried. Token tried handing him a napkin he stashed in his cup holder, but he swatted it away, too ashamed to know that Token saw how much he felt like crying to try. He didn’t look Token in the eye again for a while, opting for the side window instead of the sunroof. He couldn’t take the pressure of it.

He only asked a few questions, just for clarification. Then, Craig ran out of things to say, and he tried to focus on keeping his breaths even. God, this was so embarrassing, and terrible.

“I just like…” he tried, sniffling loudly (he’d blame the cool air outside if asked), “I really wanted this. I wanted it so bad dude, and it just like, blew up entirely in my face. I didn’t realize I didn’t want it until I was there, and then it was just too late, and now I feel like fucking crap all the time because I feel like I got used as a… as a  _ sex toy, _ instead of treated like a fucking person. And I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Token was quiet. His eye contact wavered, glancing down while he processed all the information Craig had just dumped on him. “I’m sorry I shoved it all on you man, I’m sorry,” Craig insisted, rubbing his chilled nose on his hoodie sleeve. “Ugh, I’m a fucking mess, Jesus Christ.” Token still didn’t speak, so Craig begged of him, “Dude, please say something.”

“Craig,” Token started, slowly, biting at his finger while he thought deeply, “I need you to know a couple things.”

A jolt of fear, deep in his chest. “Okay.”

“First, I am, seriously, so fucking sorry this happened to you,“ Token said, and odd relief flooded Craig’s senses. Validation was something he didn’t know he needed, but god, it was easy to see that he did now. Sure, Kenny had talked to him, but it wasn’t the same. Token wasn’t there. He had nothing to go on but Craig’s word, which he trusted, and that felt surprisingly good.

“Thanks.”

“Yeah,” Token said, but he was clearly not done. “You didn’t deserve any of that. Tweek is a goddamn bitch and you know, I hope it’s okay, but I fucking hate him.”

Damn. That was a blow.

“I know.” Craig faltered though, because he wasn’t sure that he did. “I mean, I think. I dunno. I hate that it’s complicated.”

Token’s face softened into something like pity. “Yeah, I know. It’s way easier for me to do it than you. So I’ll hate him with my whole damn being for you for now, cool?”

Craig laughed a bit, his shoulders moving up and down but without much joy to them. “Cool.”

“Secondly, I want you to seriously know this isn’t your fault.” Craig dwelled on that for a minute. Let the implication seep into his brain. Doubted it.

“Well, I mean, I wanted to do it—”

“But then you didn’t, right?” Token urged.

“Well, yeah—”

“And they didn’t stop, and you didn’t feel like you could get out, so it’s not your fault.”

Craig’s thoughts petered out. “But I didn’t really say anything,” he offered weakly.

“That doesn’t matter.” Token’s worry lines increased. “Craig, dude, do you realize what happened to you was, like…” He stopped, and seemed to struggle with what he wanted to say next. Eventually, he sort of whispered it, like he was still afraid to say it himself. “Like,  _ assault?” _

Craig took a sharp breath in, and he looked away from Token entirely, to stare out his window again. The sky was black now, and beautiful as always. For the first time ever, he wished he wasn’t here, with Token, in their special place. This sucked. “Dude, this sucks.”

Token sighed. “Yeah, for real. But seriously. I need you to understand that this was, like, assault, alright? And, I don’t wanna freak you out, but, it sounds like  _ rape, _ dude.”

Rape?

Sure, it was assault, he could kind of make some peace with that, maybe. But  _ rape? _

Craig didn’t say anything to that, just looked up and wished he could fly among those stars and escape from all the bullshit he couldn’t seem to dodge. His life was thoroughly turned upside down—which, he guessed, was probably something that happened to assault victims. “Do I have to call it that?” Craig said, hesitantly, and Token,  _ finally, _ relented.

“Not if you’re not ready to,” he said, slowly. “But seriously. It’s not your fault, okay? You were assaulted, and that’s not your fault. No matter what you wanna call it.”

He’d seen this on posters, heard about it in health class. How the victim of an assault needed to understand it wasn’t their fault they were assaulted and all that boring stuff, and that made the contrast hard to swallow. He wasn’t a helpless girl on a poster, or a boy crying out his window. He was just stupid. It wasn’t the same.

Token didn’t want to hear that though, so he didn’t say it. “Okay,” he said instead, and that was all he felt like he really had the energy to lie about.

They tried talking about other stuff, the usual stuff, but it wasn’t the same. Craig still wished he could curl up in a ball and die from embarrassment, even though Token had clearly gone out of his way to try to make him feel better and more comfortable, which just made him feel guilty. Was it going to be like this every time? He really didn’t want to keep going through this, every time he told the truth. He wasn’t sure if it would ever be worth it again.

Before Craig got out of Token’s car, having survived long enough to make it back home, Token stopped him.

“Dude, for real?” His eyes softened. “Just tell me if you gotta talk, a’ight? I’m here, my phone, my DMs are here, wherever.” Craig didn’t respond, just sighed and nodded, unable to meet his gentle gaze. The air was as uncomfortable in the car as he felt inside. “Uh, have a good night,” Token concluded, and Craig mumbled the same back.

His feet were made of lead and he struggled to kick his shoes off, weighed down by every weight pressing down on every muscle in his back. His mom called out to him from the living room, but he ignored her, clunking his metal feet up the stairs to his safe haven in measured, tripping steps. He shut the door behind him and fell face first on his bed, groaning into his comforter and debating if he felt like putting pajamas on or would rather just pass out like this. He decided to grab his flannel pajama pants anyway, but didn’t bother changing his t-shirt—a compromise.

His mom knocked on his door mere minutes later, and he groaned again.  _ “What?” _ he snarled, and his mom shoved the door open.

“Don’t talk to me that way, Craig, come on,” she said, exhaustion evident in her face when he rolled over and actually looked at her. She was leaning against his door frame, and her arms were crossed in a way that didn’t necessarily communicate irritation, but it was hard to interpret the classic mom pose as anything else.

“Fine, what is it?” he tried again. She seemed appeased enough.

“I’m asking you,” she said, and Craig inwardly cringed. He was  _ not _ willing to spill his heart out twice in one day.

“Nothing,” he muttered, and she sighed, scanning over his disaster of a room. He could tell she was silently judging him, and was about to say—

“Clean your room by the end of the week. It stinks in here.”

Well, at least she’d dropped the other thing.

“Fine,” he agreed, and she grabbed his door handle, ready to close it behind her, but she paused.

“You know,” she said, carefully, quietly, “you can talk to me, right?” He didn’t say anything, so she rolled her eyes a bit, but continued. “I know it’s lame to talk to your mother when you’re a teenager, but I’m serious. Talk to me if you need anything.”

He still grappled with what to say. His emotions were all over the place. He loved his mom, like he was supposed to, and she did a pretty alright job of raising him and Tricia, but somewhere along the line of becoming a shitty high schooler, he’d stopped confiding in her. Maybe that was shitty too, he didn’t know, but didn’t most kids do that? Some part of him always felt wrong about dropping it though, like he’d wronged her. They used to talk all the time when he was littler. Maybe he missed it, just a little.

“‘Kay,” he answered, and she took it pretty okay, for being a shit answer.

“Alright. Goodnight, love you,” she said as she pulled away from him and back to the hall, the door following.

“Night,” he called back, and she clicked the door shut, ending their conversation for the night.

Craig rolled all the way over—on his back with his eyes on his rocket ships—and he let the usual numbing, disconcerting buzzing feeling take over his body while his thoughts ran free. Token wanted to help him, and he had to have known there was something wrong to want to help in the first place. Even his mom knew something was up, and she usually didn’t bother him. Why was he doing such a bad job of hiding this?

Craig was the impenetrable wall, the quiet guy at the back of the classroom. Nobody knew what went on in his head, and ordinarily he took pride in that. And yet, these people, however close to him, could tell he was off almost instantly. He was losing his touch, or maybe more accurately, he’d been robbed of it. He drifted off to sleep with a sinking feeling of dread for how Token might act toward him tomorrow. It was punctuated by the flitting of his heart in his chest, frenzied by anxiety, two ends of the same spectrum of not knowing what to feel. God, he hoped he wouldn’t act different. He didn’t know if he could handle any more different.

Hand prints visited him again that night, like that had almost every other. They were like ghosts, cold and sharp and everywhere, for every second he spent unconscious. They reminded him that the worst was not over, that they were not done harassing him every moment they could. This time, they were combined with a low chanting of  _ “assault, assault, assault,” _ like they’d taken the word as their own names to try to take it away from him before he’d even used it. He kept reaching forward in his dream, but he never knew what for, just felt the strain in his muscles and the desperation in the rapid beat of his heart.

It meant he didn’t feel very well rested the next morning, as usual.

Thankfully, Token wasn’t different. He met up with him at the high school’s front doors, and after the usual silent nod of acknowledgement, they were the same overtired dudes as always. He was relieved, and happy.

While he walked down the hallway to his first class with Token still at his side, Kenny McCormick passed him with a smile and a wave, and it took Craig a moment to realize there’d been no explosion.

_ Huh. One down, then. _

Token broke away to go down an opposite hallway, and Craig was left alone in a sea of zombies, all of them stumbling, all of them groaning. The rest of his walk to history was uneventful.

_ One painfully stubborn, massive landmine to go. _


	8. I Will Protect You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woah, has it really been almost two months? Rough! I usually try to update faster than that. As compensation (or really it just happened to fall this way), have an extra long chapter!

One math test, two English quizzes, and one art project passed.

Craig didn’t do an excellent job of keeping time by the date even before everything happened, but now, he hardly had a clue. The days passed him by like a bustling crowd, shoving him back and forth between unfamiliar shoulders and making him feel small and dead. If anything, he could at least keep track of class schedules, reminded by his friends whenever something important would be showing up on his desk. One of the positives of going to a small school was that everyone was doing the same projects at the same time, and it meant they could huddle together to get shit done where Craig’s motivation was lacking, but he still felt like shit to be dragging them down by not trying hard enough.

Token had tried a lot. He continued to try, even though Craig was a complete bitch to him about stuff most of the time. In his defense, he’d jumped into things like legal issues way too fucking fast, which Token had himself admitted.

“You know, you could report this. You could try going to the cops,” Token had suggested, only days after Craig had poured his heart out about all that happened in the car, and it made him snap. He barked that he wanted to be left alone, and pouted in silence until Token got the picture. He felt bad about it though, the entire time, because he knew that Token just wanted to help. He just didn’t know how Token _could._

There was a biology test today. Tuesday, he had to remind himself. It was April 17th. Eight weeks left until graduation.

Jesus, only eight weeks.

“Hey bro, what’s up dude?” Clyde called over the clashing of voices in the school hallway, and Craig greeted him with a nod and a brief clap on the back. Clyde didn’t know what the fuck was happening with him most of the time, but Craig especially wanted him out of _this_ loop.

“Bio test right?” Craig tried to confirm, but the way Clyde’s smile froze and then disappeared into an expression of horror and then dead humor was enough of a sign that he’d delivered some really bad news. Clyde didn’t actually say anything out loud, which was pretty funny—just fizzled out and died right there in the hall. Craig cracked a smile, even snorted for good measure. “Dude, I just saw all five stages of grief go through your face.”

“Bruh I totally forgot about this test. Fuck, I’m so fucked. I’m so bad at biology.” Even as he delivered his own eulogy, Clyde didn’t exactly quit smiling. It was like a nervous, resigned smile, that he sort of laughed through.

“Taking it in stride I see,” Craig said, voice flat as he could make it, and Clyde rolled his eyes before looking Craig dead in the face, equally dead inside but extra dramatic about it.

“How the fuck did you remember that and I didn’t? I mean, fuck, I never remember stuff either, but you’ve been even worse lately. Senioritis bit you way in the ass, right?” Clyde nodded sagely, before Craig could answer. “Same, bro, same.”

Somehow, Clyde managed to jump topics like a frog hopping lily pads, and Craig was not following today. Usually when Clyde lost him, he just shut up. So, he gave him a blank stare, shrugged, and headed off to the next class, Clyde nipping at his heels like a tiny, yappy dog, going on about whatever video game he played last night.

Then the eyes came.

Green sent fire down the wires of his nerves straight into his sternum, igniting the carved runes that spoke of ‘ _danger, imminent danger!’_ deep in his chest. They caught his blue, and they faced him head-on, dewdrops clear as summer and the smell of freshly cut flowers. They said other things now though, like abandonment; the loneliness of a broken down shack in a late summer rain; the murkiness of a deep forest. Pain.

A gentle mouth parted. Craig kept walking.

He tore his focus away from those unforgiving, unseeing eyes, and he power-walked forward as quickly as he possibly could, weaving around people as he went. Clyde followed him. “Dude, was that Tweek? You want me to get him? Haven’t seen him in awhile, you know-”

“Will you shut your fucking mouth?” Craig snapped, turning his head back to spit the venom in his words right in Clyde’s face, but he just caught green again. They were looking back at him but they kept moving away, and soon (but not soon enough) they turned a corner, and he was left alone. Craig was safe.

“Dude, what?” Clyde balked, and Craig’s eyes leapt down, to his friend’s angry, _actually angry,_ face. A chill hit Craig again, maybe even stronger than the first one. One person’s emotions he could handle, but two? He stuttered, searching for an explanation, but he found none because there wasn’t one, except that he had been so caught up in his own bullshit that he’d pissed off one of the only people who cared.

“I dunno what your fucking problem is lately, but you gotta fix it,” Clyde bit, and he tore away from him too, and Craig was that broken down shack, beaten by the forest rain.

 

* * *

 

 “You gotta talk eventually,” Kenny said, talking over the butt of his cigarette, poised closely to his mouth to fight the biting spring-morning cold. He exhaled, letting the smoke trickle from his lips like a gaseous waterfall, and Craig watched, trying his best to listen while also trying his best not to. “It’s getting harder to fend ‘im off.”

Craig knew that, but he also questioned it, like maybe if he just didn’t talk to Tweek he could dissolve and leave him alone for good. They were almost graduated anyway, and then he could avoid certain streets around town once everyone else moved out, and—

Craig quickly realized, every time, that this was a pipe dream at best, and a poor attempt to escape reality at worst. Its recurrence didn’t make it any less painful to remember.

“Yeah I guess,” he answered, so as to not leave Kenny hanging, but it wasn’t really an answer. Kenny grunted and looked away, staring out down the tracks all the way until they disappeared behind the curve of a high hill. Craig looked too, not interested in eye contact either. He felt guilty, because Kenny was clearly doing something to keep Tweek off his tail, considering he hadn’t actually been bothered in weeks. It didn’t mean he was ‘coping,’ but it helped keep him from wanting to rip his hair out every time he had to walk somewhere alone, for fear of locking into an inescapable confrontation.

The rail track was cold under his ass, and he tried adjusting his position, knowing full well though that nothing he did was gonna make it more comfortable. He didn’t know how Kenny had sat on them for as long as he did. Maybe he was just used to it.

“How are you, uh,” Kenny started, scratching at his hair under his hood and shoving it out of his eyes, clearly uncomfortable. “How you doin’?”

Craig huffed through his nose. Well, it was an attempt. “I mean, fine, I guess,” he answered with a shrug. “School’s almost over, so.”

“Yeah,” Kenny sighed, leaning forward on his knees and letting his arm bounce out, the cigarette nearly dead. “Sometimes I wonder if I shoulda just dropped out forever ago.”

“What for?” Craig asked, though he didn’t actually care all that much, admittedly. This was just the way it’d been though, for a little while.

He’d been showing up at Kenny’s house Sunday mornings for a few weeks. The first time was to try to chase away the demons that were still scratching at his brain in his sleep, scrabbling like cartoonish, blackened little hands, curled with claws. He didn’t know anyone else who would be (mysteriously) reliably around at any given moment of the day, so he shot him a text and he replied in record time, and they met at the tracks, as close as Craig was willing to get to ground zero.

It was a routine neither of them had confirmed to be legitimate, but it kept happening, the same way every time, so he guessed ‘routine’ was the best word for it anyway.

“Dunno, coulda helped with the bills more. Can’t make a tonna money the way I am now, as a high schooler and shit. It’s not like I’m really learning anything _important_ either, y’know?”

Craig blinked to come back into focus, visually and mentally. “Yeah I guess.”

Kenny made his own little huff, and Craig looked over to see him smiling with his brow wrinkled—the oxymoron of Kenny’s concern. “Man, you gotta quit doin’ that.”

“Doing what?” he asked.

“Spacing out. You’re gonna fly away, man. You gotta try to keep your feet on the ground if you’re gonna get better, you know.” Kenny actually looked at him, his eyes striking in the mid-morning sun, and Craig could’ve sworn he felt thousands more staring at him too. They weren’t threatening though, more comforting actually, a little accusatory but well-meaning. Sometimes the things Kenny said were things he’d guess could only come out of someone’s mouth if they were thoroughly high, but he knew it was actually just Kenny.

Craig sighed, and leaned forward too, letting his forearms take the brunt of his weight on his legs. It stopped them from shaking, the way they tapped at the ground rapidly until he patted down a little foot-shaped patch in the rocks. “But like, how though?” he asked, his tone of voice a little too obviously exhausted.

“I count stuff,” Kenny said with a shrug. “If I gotta stay on planet Earth, I count things around me. Like, uh, brown rocks or steps and stuff. The stuff right in front’a me that I wouldn’t notice otherwise. Stuff grounded with me.” He sighed, and stood up, one hand stuffed awkwardly in his pocket and shoulders hunched. “S’why I don’t count stars, or birds or clouds. They ain’t stuck here like me, but the flowers are, the footprints are.”

Craig looked down at his own feet, where his footprints were. They were hard to make out, with most of the snow melted to sludge and pushed from the tracks, but the heels of his shoes where they’d stomped out their marks were visible. He could try counting, he guessed. It was worth a shot anyway, with how hard Earth had made it lately to stay stuck to it.

“Thanks,” he muttered, and Kenny hummed his polite acceptance, to ring in another fifteen minutes of uninterrupted, comfortable silence while his cigarette died. When it finally did, and he stomped it out in the dirt, they said their goodbyes, and Craig trudged back home while he thought about counting. So simple, so empty. He could try it though.

Craig would try anything, at this point. Anything to forget, come back, go back to normal. It was worth a shot, so he counted the dandelions pushing through the grooves of the sidewalk.

There were five.

 

* * *

 

Craig wished the front door wasn’t so fucking loud. There really was no sneaking in or out, when his parents had the hearing of hawks or whatever heard really well. It was why that Sunday, after meditating on his need to speak to Tweek eventually and the sun starting to set, he very much despised the fact that his mother basically followed him up to his room.

He didn’t want to talk to her. He kind of didn’t want to talk to anyone. He wanted the peace and quiet of his room, and maybe some music playing from his laptop, and staring at the ceiling. That was a typical Sunday lately, when homework honestly had no meaning to him anymore when he felt his life falling apart and high school was basically over. He didn’t need exceptional grades to get into the community college. Just grades in general, really.

She knocked but she opened the door regardless of his answer, which was a big groan. “Hey,” she said, not sounding particularly pleased but also not super mad. “Where you been all day?”

“Kenny’s,” Craig mumbled, sitting up on his bed and letting his legs hang off the edge. He assumed she came here to say he had some odd chore to do.

“Kenny?” she asked, and Craig sighed.

“Yeah, McCormick. We’re like, kind of friends now.” It was kind of hard to conceptualize, but it was true, and she just sort of made a quick noise of acknowledgement before stepping just slightly further into his room. Craig shifted backwards the tiniest bit, to equalize the distance between them. He wasn’t sure if she noticed.

“Alright,” she started. She didn’t sound confident, which made Craig nervous. Confidence was her default. “First of all, this room is a mess and you have to clean it before the end of the day.” Craig moaned his protests but she gave him a warning look to shut up. He didn’t have the energy to fight.

“Second, I wanted to talk to you for real.” She took a deep breath, a noticeable one. “About your attitude.”

“Mom,” Craig said, exasperated, tired as fuck. “What fucking attitude?”

“I don’t mean sass,” she clarified, and she leaned against the door frame on one hip, looking tired herself. “I mean, you seem a little fucked up lately. Sad, or otherwise distressed. I wanted to talk about whatever that’s about.”

Craig didn’t respond right away. What could he say? Again, he felt forced to talk about something he hated acknowledging. Fuck, he was so tired of this. “Do I have to talk to you? Come on,” Craig complained, but his mom just narrowed her glare across the room, and fear manifested in his chest like it’d started doing all the fucking time. He was so tired of anxiety, too.

“Is it school? Are you in shit?”

“No.”

“Friends? Doing something stupid?”

“No, mom.”

“Hard drugs?”

“Mom!” Craig snapped, then cringed as he realized the sin he committed. His mother shrunk back, but stood taller, asserting her dominance. He hated that so much.

Dominance scared the fuck out of him now.

“Is it something to do with like...“ She hesitated. “Relationships?” Craig didn’t answer. He didn’t want to, desperately.

“Please, mom.” He pleaded. He sounded so pathetic, God. He regretted his tone of voice: so small, and obvious.

Finally, she responded, a little quieter than normal, so abnormal. “Are you... okay, Craig?”

The silence that suddenly befell his room was thick, gobs of tension and fear and frustration in clouds of dark shadows and burning sunset red. Craig sat there, on the edge of his bed, while his mother stood at the door, silent too. She wasn’t being aggressively confrontational anymore, but she was still present when he didn’t want her to be. God, he didn’t _want_ this conversation.

He didn’t want _any_ of this.

He wouldn’t wish this, this soul-crushing, _deeply_ conflicting feeling, on anyone.

Then, he did exactly what he really didn’t want to do, what he wanted to do least of all.

He started to cry.

He watched his mother panic through a watery lens. She started out confused, then her face crumpled into devastated pity, and that just made Craig cry harder. “Oh, honey,” she floundered, and then she stepped past his invisible salt circle and broke right into his sanctuary to hold him in her arms. She sat down next to him and he collapsed into her lap, and he cried.

God, he was a lousy crier. His breaths were so ragged he may as well be a chain smoker, and his little hiccups and shudders were pathetic. All the while his mother hushed him, trying to soothe him with low motherly sounds while she stroked her thin, manicured nails through his hair in gentle swoops. She hadn’t done this in ages, maybe even years, and Craig couldn’t think of a time he’d ever needed it more.

He let his face get flushed and his eyes get puffy, and didn’t move away when his breathing started to stabilize. He kept his head thoroughly tucked away in the crook of his mother’s shoulder, where he’d made a bed of damp fabric for his face to fall. The silence of his room started to settle again, and he didn’t like that, but thankfully she broke it first.

“You don’t have to tell me what’s wrong,” she amended, which really only made Craig feel worse, because clearly she was trying not to overstep boundaries. He had carefully drawn them too, further and further out from himself the older he got, far enough that she could barely see him. She was always really cool about it, but her attempts to respect his space now just made him feel bad.

“I should probably talk, but you gotta promise me like, one thing,” Craig said, croaking like a dying frog with a cracking throat clogged up with mucus and sadness. He still didn’t look up from his self-made watery grave.

“You got it,” she said, and Craig went on.

“You gotta say you’re not gonna call the cops,” Craig whispered, and he finally looked up just to see his mother’s extremely conflicted face.

“The cops?” she asked, surprisingly calm for what he’d just insinuated. “Craig, is someone hurt?” _Yes._ “What happened?” _Well…_

“Promise,” he asserted, sitting up and detaching from his spot to look her as seriously in the eye as he could knowing how inflamed his face was. He must look pathetic.

She didn’t answer for an uncomfortably long time. Craig grew more and more anxious as she seemed to think harder and harder, weighing her options without actually knowing the situation he was talking about yet. He knew he was putting her in a difficult position, but he didn’t really have a choice. What mattered now was that things didn’t get out of hand, and that he kept a firm grip on the situation. His mother would have to shut up, listen, and _not call the cops_ for him to be able to do that.

“Okay,” she conceded, though not entirely. “Tell me what’s happening, and then if I feel like we _need_ to, we’ll talk about cops. Deal?”

Craig sighed, letting his shoulders slump again and his posture crumple in. “Deal.” He took a minute to assess how much information he was going to have to relay, and realized there was quite a bit of story she’d have to be filled in on. “So like… okay, there are some layers to this. You know I’m like, not a virgin, right?”

She blinked. “I assumed not but I know for sure now, I guess. As long as you’re using protection and taking care of yourself, you can do what you want.” She let out a sigh, and she leaned forward, trying to get closer to Craig. He let her into his bubble, and he felt a little calmer. “Look, Craig,” she said, “you’re eighteen now. I’m still keeping you from living in filth and you’re still finishing up high school, but you’re technically an adult, and that means I don’t get to say anything about what you do anymore. So, I don’t know, you could be out having sex five times a day and I couldn’t say anything except that I was concerned you were wearing yourself out-”

_“Mom,”_ Craig protested, a blush turning his whole face red, and she snickered a bit, losing her composure.

“Jokes aside, your sex life doesn’t have anything to do with me anymore.” She shrugged. “It’s weird, but that’s something I’m just gonna have to get used to, because you’re an adult.”

“Okay.” Craig took a second to take that in for himself, and really cursed himself for not having talked to his mom sooner, about anything.

“So basically, I’ve had this crush for a while, and… some things, um, happened.”

Talking to his mother wasn’t quite the same as talking to Token or Kenny, because no matter how much she tried to insist they were both adults and he could talk freely, it was still way too weird to tell her the specifics about having a cock in his mouth and ass, in any situation.

“He invited me to go to a mutual friend’s house and then we started, kinda, you know. And at first I was really excited, like ‘holy shit, my crush wants to have sex with me, this is amazing,’ you know, but then during it I just started to feel… wrong.”

“Wrong how?” she asked. She had gotten very serious very quickly. Her face was stern, like he was about to be in trouble, but he knew it wasn’t directed at him at least. It was still kinda scary though.

“I dunno, he just like, slapped me? And I wasn’t expecting it?” He winced. “And like, I didn’t really say ‘no,’ or be really clear about what was going on, but inside I was really freaking out. I just felt like I couldn’t do anything, and they just kept going. I felt… _used._ Like my feelings totally didn’t matter. And that sounds lame but it fucking sucks Mom, like it really fucking sucks.”

He took a shaky breath, trying to will away the tears springing back up in his eyes, and she was completely still except for the hand she offered him to hold. He took it, hastily, and she gave his hand a little encouraging squeeze. It was what he needed to continue.

“So yeah, I just realized at some point that I really hated it. And I wanted out, but I didn’t _say_ I wanted out, so like how could they have known, you know? I don’t know. I’m constantly trying to decide if it’s my fault somehow, like I should’ve just told them and then we could’ve stopped before we got that far. But I couldn’t. I dunno.”

The silence in the room was near-unbearable, but he knew he gave his mother a ton of information to process. She was clearly thinking, calculating her response, and his anxiety was through the roof wondering what it was she was going to say.

“Craig, I need you to know something, okay?” she said. It was very quiet. It caught Craig off-guard even, how gentle and almost nervous she sounded. His worries grew even stronger, though turned in a different direction. He nodded, and she continued. “I haven’t been in the same exact situation before, so I can’t tell you exactly how to feel. But I kinda know,” she sighed. “There are a lot of shitty feelings that come out of this sort of thing. You feel like you don’t matter, and your self-esteem just disappears. And you’re constantly afraid no one will believe you.”

Craig resonated with every word of what she said, and it was terrifying. He had to wonder how many other people went through this sort of thing, this situation where it’s all muddy as hell and nothing is clear, and no one has any answers for each other.

“But Craig, honey,” she said, her voice softening, “I promise, I believe you. And just because you didn’t say ‘no’ doesn’t mean you weren’t hurt.”

He’d heard the words before, kind of from Token, and some TV show, but it was different when it was from his mom. Like it meant more, because she knew him. He kind of wanted to cry again, but he held it together, and instead just leaned forward enough to get another hug from her. She was so gentle with him, like he hadn’t aged a day from the years ago he last let her do this.

He closed his eyes and let himself get comfortable. He grappled with what to say, for probably too long, but eventually he gave up and realized he only really had one thing he _could_ say. “Thanks, mom,” he mumbled, and she put a hand over the back of his head, cradling him to her shoulder.

“Of course,” she whispered.

Craig didn’t move from his spot. “Do I need to call the cops now?” he asked, half-expecting an emphatic ‘yes.’

“Not if you don’t want to,” she said, to his surprise, and he felt the one-armed shrug she made with her free shoulder.

“Really?”

“Craig,” she huffed, “you’re eighteen. I already said that. You can do whatever you want with it. My advice is to go with what you feel like is right, but!” She stopped him before he could interject. “That means what _you_ feel is right for _you,_ not whatever those bastards have to say or think. Got it?”

He nodded, and settled back into her hold. “I don’t think I’m gonna,” he admitted, and she hummed.

“Why is that?”

“Because it’s not as like, raw anymore. Like, I think I’ll be okay and I don’t need a police report to say what happened to feel like it’s real.”

“Sounds good,” she said, and she scratched at his shoulder in an act of affection, encouraging him to sit up straight. She was smiling at him. “I love you, and I’m proud of you for talking to me. You didn’t have to do that.”

He sighed, looking away. “I know, but I kind of needed to.”

“Probably,” she said, nodding, “and that’s why I’m proud of you.”

She got up off his bed with one last tousle of his hair, and stepped around the dirty laundry on his floor. When she got to the doorway, she turned back around, and scanned over his floor one last time. “I guess you can wait to clean this up.”

Craig scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Yeah, thanks,” he groaned, half joking.

“Of course,” she said, a sly grin poorly masked on her lips. At least she caught his sarcasm. “But seriously, just talk to me whenever you need to, okay? I love you, Craig,” she said, and Craig caught her eyes one last time.

They were sad, but loving, green and murky in the darkened light of his bedroom no longer lit by a bright sunset. Normally, at this moment, he would protest her love loudly and dramatically, just to make sure he maintained his bratty teenager status. This time though, he wanted that _‘I love you,’_ maybe even needed it. So, in a rare moment of weakness, he murmured, “Love you too,” and he was secretly glad to see a little light jump back in her eyes and her smile before she turned to close the door behind her.

Craig turned the music on his laptop up, but instead of the usual melancholic playlist for his perpetually sad Sunday nights, he played his carefully curated energetic collection. He let the power of the guitar riffs overtake the sadness and confusion in his heart, and he mouthed along to the lyrics with little smiles in-between while he played a few hours of his favorite Zelda throwback.

He fell asleep that night with four people on his mind—three he wanted, one he didn’t. Token, his mom, even Kenny—they tried. He felt human again, at least, for being given the space to talk and to feel all the emotions he hated acknowledging. The unfortunate thing that came with feeling human though was the acknowledgement that he still felt like utter shit, all the time, and the only person who could maybe fix it didn’t seem like he cared enough to do anything about it.

_‘Or maybe he didn’t realize,’_ Craig thought, as his last bits of consciousness left his bones and he drifted away into dreamless sleep, ‘ _how fucked up it was.’_ The thought was uncomfortable, disappointing. Crushing.

Maybe Tweek didn’t get it at all, and that was the hardest part.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemme know your thoughts if you've got a sec in the comments! Thank you for reading so far and I'll look forward to seeing you back!


	9. The Beginning of The End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tweek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Welcome back. This chapter might be pretty hard to get through, so I'll warn that conversation does go into the assault and there is a brief mention of self-harm (not actually performed, just used as a metaphor). I hope you enjoy, and please let me know what you think in a comment if you have the time. I'm a little anxious about this one, since it is such a huge, huge moment. Thank you!

May 8, 12:42 pm

adult virgin:

   Jimbos got some exciting fuckin news lads

   Tell em @ya boi skinny penis

 

ya boi skinny penis:

   They’re ripping up this bit of the train tracks by my house to pour new concrete soon

 

adult virgin:

   Dude. wheres the pizazz

   This is great

 

Biggest Blackest Dick:

   Why is this great?

 

adult virgin:

   Bruh we can write our fuckin names in the concrete or some shit!

   Like the movies??

May 8, 3:28 pm

   Wow. Feeling the fuckin love

 

Biggest Blackest Dick:

   Sorry. It’s pretty cool I guess

 

ya boi skinny penis:

   I think they’ll be putting it down July

 

Biggest Blackest Dick:

   So we’ll care about it in July?

 

adult virgin:

   We gotta come up with smth cool tho

   Like

   A symbol

 

Biggest Blackest Dick:

   You’re really riding this movie thing huh.

 

adult virgin:

   Fuck yea I am

   @move I’m gay any ideas? where u at bro

 

Craig’s thumbs hovered over his phone’s keyboard, paused after having scrolled through the conversation he missed while he napped the afternoon away. A little smile made his cheeks hurt, reminding him just how little he smiled lately.

While he recognized that maybe writing in concrete wasn’t as cool as Clyde thought it was, he at least appreciated the enthusiasm, and would probably contribute. If they all were, it’d be something important. Something permanent. Something about this made Craig feel secure in a way he didn’t completely understand. He sighed and rolled over on his bed, reaching for a shirt to pull over his chest, which had stopped being a self-heater the moment he groggily came back to life. He then picked his phone back up, and came up with some sort of response, to show he was listening at least.

 

move I’m gay:

   I dunno. Sounds cool though

 

ya boi skinny penis:

   That’s the spirit

 

adult virgin:

   Yea!!! Good

   It’s gonna be fuckin SPECIAL gdi

 

Craig huffed a laugh through his nose.

 

move I’m gay:

   Yeah I think so

 

adult virgin:

   :)

 

Biggest Blackest Dick:

   Are we still on for next Saturday?

 

Craig tuned out while the rest of them planned some sort of outing. Usually, they would organize something and then invite Craig, and he would decide if he was coming or not. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it gave Craig a chance to assess the situation before he committed, but he figured they had to do that on purpose. Maybe to keep pressure off or something, he didn’t know, but it meant he didn’t have to stress about anything so it was a win for him and that was good enough. They’d tag him when they were done.

Such was the routine. It was one he enjoyed with those little smiles, acknowledgments of caring. The routine, however, got interrupted. His phone vibrated on his dresser while he tugged on fresh pajama pants.

He picked it up, fully expecting the notification that he’d been tagged for his answer, but instead, an unwanted guest filled his inbox.

Tweek.

A little flicker of anxiety lashed at the emptiness in his lungs, and he swallowed heavy to try to quell it. It was stupid that he was still so freaked out by him. Shouldn’t he have gotten over it already? It wasn’t even that big of a deal.

Still.

He opened up the text message after ages of hesitating, taking gentle steps backwards to sit back on the edge of his bed while he read.

 

    _hey. can we talk?_

 

It wasn’t much, but it was still everything. Craig didn’t want to talk to him. Both his mother and Token had told him he could do whatever he needed to heal from the struggle he’d been having, but Kenny kept saying they needed to talk. He spent hours wondering about this at night too: _‘Should we talk? Should I avoid him entirely?’_ A dilemma he wasn’t sure how to solve.

It was a little different, though, if the other half of the problem reached out first. He wasn’t sure he was prepared for that. So, he answered him honestly.

 

_Idk_

 

The blue dot-dot-dots appeared almost immediately, and Craig’s heart clenched uncomfortably hard.

 

    _youve been so weird i wa nt to see u_

_i feel like smthn’s wrong and i dont know how to fix it without knowing what it is_

_:(_

 

He genuinely didn’t seem to understand, and that made Craig angry instead of sad. A hurt sort of angry, which made him want to block his number and break his phone in half and punch his pillows to death while he cried about it. He entertained the thought, imagining himself doing it in vivid detail, but he kept cool on the outside. He needed to be stronger than that.

Tweek’s sincerity, however, also made Craig wonder if he should just meet up with him, and actually talk. Maybe it would give some closure, or open his stupid pretty eyes to the horrible shit he’d committed, probably without knowing. God, again Craig went through the script, wondering if Tweek had been on some sort of drug or just generally unaware of Craig’s distress. How that wasn’t really his fault, and he should have really said no instead of just going along with it, no matter how much he didn’t want it. It was all so confusing, and he did end up smacking the end of his bed in frustration, the one way he felt he could lash out without actually breaking something.

A knock at the door startled him, and he looked up from his phone sharply to see his mother in the doorway, already having swung the door open. “What’s up?” she asked, and Craig sighed, heavy enough to feel the weight in his sternum pressing into his upset stomach.

“Just got a text,” he offered, and she hummed but didn’t leave. She knew something was wrong, mostly because he wasn’t really trying to hide it.

“You want me to bring you dinner?” she asked, and he shook his head.

“Already put on new pants,” he said, slapping his hands on his thighs for emphasis, “and I need to get outta here.”

“Agreed,” she said, inquisitive, “but I thought I’d still offer.” Then she fucked off, probably to eat with everyone else. Craig sighed, glancing back down at his phone that glowed brighter at him the lower the sun got.

Did Tweek even deserve an explanation? Should he bother? The questions ran through his head even faster now that the pressure was on, and a headache was forming at the bridge of his nose. The fear in his chest could not be understated, overwhelmingly scary and freezing him in place both emotionally and physically.

 

_We should talk._

 

That was all he said. Tweek started typing again, almost immediately, but Craig dropped his phone face-down on the bed and leaned forward on his elbows, groaning. He’d used so much energy just to say that, and he wasn’t even sure it was the right answer. He just didn’t have the power to keep talking to him, and so he begrudgingly left him on read while he went downstairs to eat dinner with the family. At least there, leaving his phone behind was something positive.

 

* * *

 

When he got the courage to flip his phone back over, he saw several unread message notifications on his lock screen. His blood running cold, he unlocked his phone and quickly tapped out of their conversation, unwilling to actually read it. He instead went straight to his open chat with Kenny, and started typing.

 

    _Hey. So Tweek is asking if we can talk and I think I have to, like you’ve been saying. I have kind of a stupid request._

 

Even without actually requesting it, he felt embarrassed, and he’d probably be blushing if anyone was paying attention to him. Thank God he was alone in his room, nothing but the backlight of his phone and his idle laptop screen to illuminate his face.

 

_good_

_whats up fuck_

 

Craig rolled his eyes, but smiled a bit anyway, at the ‘nickname.’ Did ‘fuck’ count as a nickname? It was sort of a derivative of ‘Tucker,’ anyway.

 

_Can like, I do this near you? Like can I talk to him by the tracks so you’re right there? You don’t have to like, be next to me, and honestly I think that’d just be embarrassing. But if you could just like… be at home, nearby._

 

He left it open, after that statement. If he wasn’t properly embarrassed before, he was now. Still, the idea of having someone there, who could protect him should anything go awry, was extremely tempting. Besides, the tracks were a pretty regular outing for him and Tweek in the past, so it wouldn’t be weird to request such a location.

 

_like keep guard_

_make sure ur safe after?_

 

At least Kenny understood what he was alluding to. His answer wasn’t necessary.

 

_no prob bro. lmk what i can do anytime_

_Just tell me when so i can be sober and home_

 

He snorted a little laugh at him. Leave that kind of shit to Kenny, he guessed. He didn’t answer him right away, because he needed to find out when for himself. He took a steadying breath in and out, and tapped back into Tweek’s little wall.

 

_ok is it smthn we have to talk out loud ab?_

_or can we txt_

_do you wanna mee tup?_

_txt me back_

 

Craig typed without thinking, fearing that if he thought, he might turn back the fuck around.

 

_Meet me at the tracks, by Kenny’s house. Tomorrow, like 3._

 

_ok hope ur ok man :(_

 

That made him laugh, too.

He wasn’t okay, thanks to him, but he’d get there.

He let Kenny know of the plan and got the okay from him as well, and then he clicked his phone off, falling back on his bed with his arms outstretched. He sighed, and glanced over to the hand that still gently clutched his phone. He’d shut the lock screen off, but the lights from the lamp post outside still glinted on its glass, keeping it alive. He tucked it under his pillow to snuff it out, and deliberately ignored it until it woke him up the next morning.

 

* * *

 

The wind was whipping at his face, ripping lashes into his skin with _thwacks_ that rung in his ears. Its chill, unusual for May, pelted his cheeks, and he shuddered, nuzzling deeper into his hoodie as he stared into the gravel while he sat on the tracks. He counted the brown rocks, like Kenny said to try, and he guessed it was helping, kind of. It at least helped keep from getting too distracted by his nerves.

The sun was right above him, trying its best to shine through thick clouds and only partially succeeding. Its outline was still there though, a circle discernible even through a thick smog, but he wished it was just a little closer so that maybe he wouldn’t be so damn cold.

Kenny’s house was behind him. It was exactly the security blanket he needed, a reminder that he wasn’t alone, and that he had protection if anything went wrong. He wasn’t really expecting it to, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t nervous anyway. Everything about Tweek made him nervous now. He wished it didn’t.

There was a particularly heavy slap to his face from the biting air, and it made him scrunch his eyes shut. When he opened them, there was a figure rounding a corner, a couple blocks ahead. Craig took a sharp breath in, and suddenly wondered if maybe he really should have had Kenny stand next to him. This was too intimate. Too much.

As he fretted, Tweek approached on quick feet, until he was close enough to call out a quick “Hey!”

Craig didn’t answer until Tweek was fifteen feet in front of him, exactly as close as he was comfortable with. “Hi,” he said, without a hint of inflection, and Tweek’s friendly smile drooped.

“So, uh, think we should cut to the chase?” Tweek asked, leaning back and forth on his toes. Craig shivered, and gulped past the weird lump in his throat. He could feel each extremity grow slowly more numb with each passing, nerve-wracking second.

“What chase?” he asked, playing dumb, curious what Tweek had to offer for him.

“Like, why have you been avoiding me, man? I don’t get it.” He shook his head and shrugged. “We did that one night at Kenny’s and then it was, _ah,_ was like you didn’t want anything to do, with me.”

“Because I didn’t,” Craig bit back, and then, as he said it, the anger started to rise from his gut. Anger he’d been avoiding, trying not to feel, trying to shove away. He’d rather be sad than angry, most times, but the dam was bursting, and the water pouring in, overflowing. He jumped up to his feet, brimming with new energy, and Tweek leaned back just slightly.

“Okay,” he said, looking confused but smiling about it, like an asshole. “I mean, I thought it was a good time.”

Another flash of rage, deep inside him. Craig wanted to growl at him, like a feral, dying animal. “You _thought,”_ he said, “but didn’t bother asking.”

“Dude, what?” Tweek said, a little nervous laugh in his throat, and Craig wished he could snuff it out. Nothing about this was fucking funny. “I dunno what the fuck you’re even talking about.”

“I’m glad you had fun getting your dick wet, but I sure as _fuck_ didn’t.” It felt good to say it out loud, even if it was terrifying, scalding on his throat.

“What-”

“You fucking slapped me, then what? Just like kept going? Not bothering to make sure it was okay?” Craig snarled. “You can’t just _fucking_ do that without talking about it first. You can’t!”

Tweek put his hands up, and the first hint of concern finally hit his face. Good. “Dude, I just thought it would be fun-”

“Yeah, _for you!”_ he roared. “You didn’t bother to fucking _ask me first,_ and then I was stuck there. Stuck! I couldn’t say no to you, because I felt bad, but I sure fucking regret it now, because it has torn me up inside _ever since.”_ Something inside him had truly broken, to allow all these feelings to fall out of his mouth without filtering them. Something about Tweek’s face told him that he needed to do it, though, so he kept going, unabashed.

“I’ve been losing my mind every fucking time I close my eyes for weeks, but I’m glad you had a good fucking time, Tweek, I’m glad.”

Tweek’s brow scrunched up, and he hit back. “How the fuck was I supposed to know?” he challenged.

“I don’t know, was my complete silence after that any kind of concern? The way I left, the way _you_ left? How you dragged me around? You made me feel like less than dirt, like I didn’t fucking matter. Like I was some _toy_ you wanted to test drive. And you know what that feels like?” He didn’t wait long enough for an answer. “Like absolute goddamn shit, Tweek! Has that ever happened to you? That sex felt like torture? It’s not fucking supposed to!”

“And you know what’s the goddamn worst?” Craig said, voice rising to greater hysterics while he brought both his hands up to pull at his hair in frustration, underneath the flaps of his hat. Tweek looked worried.

“Don’t do that-”

“I still like you!” Craig barked, laughing without any of the humor in it, huffing to himself with a wide, watery smile. “I-I went through all that, and I still _fucking_ like you.”

He’d spent so long trying to deny it. So many hours staring at his ceiling trying to fight it down. Trying to convince himself of his worth, but not quite being able to, because Tweek’s eyes were still beautiful, even if they scared the shit out of him now. He was still unattainable, an enigma, no matter what he’d done, and he didn’t know how to forgive himself for that.

“Craig, I-”

“No, I’m gonna talk,” he snapped, and Tweek stumbled back a bit, clearly startled by the outburst. Probably by his meltdown in general, but fuck it, he had a lot of energy to get out, and if he didn’t slice his veins open right now, he doubted he’d be able to get the adrenaline and fear out of his bloodstream ever again.

So, he took a deep breath in through his nose.

“I wish it didn’t happen how it did.” He stuffed his hands in his hoodie’s pockets, hunching over as a particularly chilly gust of wind hit from the west. “But that’s how it happened. And that can’t just go away.” He sighed, something horribly heavy that felt both like relief and the return of his agony at the same time. He was glad Tweek had shut up, at least. “So. There’s that, I guess.”

“Craig, I…” Tweek trailed off, and Craig finally looked at him again, but wished he hadn’t. In his eyes were tears- genuine tears. They threatened to spill over with each quick blink of his eyelashes, dusted by the sunlight that overtook both their bodies. They were still beautiful, and Craig was angry.

“No!” he yelped. “You are _not_ allowed to cry right now—” his voice cracked in the middle of his sentence and his throat got thicker with each syllable “—not now. Not after all the fucking bullshit tears I’ve cried over this. These are _my_ tears to cry!” And with that, he realized he already had them streaming down his face.

Behind him, the click of machinery came to life, startling them both. Craig looked back, and watched the arm of the guard rail for the tracks come steadily down, the little alarm bell ticking and flashing red. A train came around the corner, the first he’d seen in probably a year, and it rushed past them both, pulling its horn and rattling as it sped by. The cars were covered in graffiti, colorful and faded together. It was strange, almost mystical, to see the tracks actually used.

Neither of them spoke while it passed, not just because it was too loud, but also because it was a little mesmerizing, a rarity. It ended with a whoosh, and the arm clunked awake to pull itself back up to a resting position. The air fell heavy between them once more, the spell broken. Craig stared Tweek down. His cheeks felt like they were cracking, where tear tracks dried against the cool breeze.

“I don’t know what to say,” Tweek said softly.

“Then don’t say it,” Craig snapped, and Tweek shut his mouth quickly after that.

Craig turned away from him. He was determined to wipe his face dry of his shame out of view, to try to erase that the tears ever came, but with each sniffle, with each footstep he put in the gravel under his pacing shoes, he realized they weren’t going away soon enough.

He tried hard not to cry too much- really, he did. So much of him felt broken now, however, that the floodgates were not only open, they were blasted to pieces, torn to shreds. He let out a few pathetic gasps and whimpers before he gave up trying to stifle them, or get rid of the tears before they fell. His sleeves were soaked anyway, and he wasn’t doing himself any good. So he turned to face Tweek again, and though anger riled back up in him at the sight of tears tracing Tweek’s cheeks too, he set it aside.

“You…” he started, and though his heart started to thud hard enough to drown out his hearing, he gulped and pushed on. “You _raped_ me, Tweek. A-and that’s never gonna go away. You know that? _God-”_ he gasped, and he blinked out new waterworks. “I didn’t know if I could ever say that out loud, but here I fucking am, I guess. You raped me, and there’s nothing you can do to erase that. _Nothing.”_

Tweek was completely silent, the tears unrelenting in their streaming down his pretty pale skin. He was staring straight ahead, failing to look him in the eye. “I deserve that.”

Anger. Fire. Red. “Damn right you deserve..!” He stopped. Breathed in and out quickly, but deeply. “Anything else?”

Tweek was pensive for a moment. He was visibly grappling with what to say. “I just like…” He leaned forward on his knees, his chin in his palms, his eyes on the ground and tears caught in his cupped fingers. “If you wanna, uh, _mmh._ Wanna press charges.” He sighed, closed his eyes. “I’ll plead guilty.”

“I- what?” Craig stumbled in his pacing, because though the option had been presented to him by Token in the past, it was much weirder to hear it from the source’s mouth. “I’m not gonna press charges.”

“Then what do you want to do?” Tweek asked, and he looked up at him, brow screwed up in a combination of fear and concern.

Craig stopped moving back and forth, back and forth in front of him. He needed to, because the energy in his walking needed to be redirected to the misfiring in his brain. “I, uh,” he said. He adjusted his hat and breathed out slowly, his lips in an ‘oh’ so that it whistled like the wind whipping around them with each gust. “I guess I don’t know.”

There was nothing left between them, and they both knew it. Though he supposed Tweek had been kind of blindsided, Craig felt he deserved to be, after all he’d done. He deserved some sort of punishment, but jail time? A trial? That didn’t seem right either.

He sighed. “I guess we pretend we don’t exist.”

Tweek looked up quickly, his eyes widening. “That’s it? Just, it’s all over? Like that?”

Craig laughed, no humor in it whatsoever. “It was always over. Ever since then, it’s been over. You were just too wrapped up in yourself to realize it.”

Tweek didn’t speak for a long time, but eventually, with his eyes at Craig’s feet, he relented. “Alright,” he said, softly, and Craig felt an unwanted tinge of regret. God, it was so unwanted, he wanted to scream.

“Alright,” he copied, none of the softness of Tweek’s voice in his own. His had edge to it, sharpness, an attempt to cut at the cords left strung between them still. He wanted this over with.

“I was gonna say I’ll talk to you later, but I guess, mm. Guess you don’t want that.” He smiled a bit, without the joy. God, this conversation was depressing.

“I really don’t,” Craig said, and Tweek sighed.

“Okay.” Tweek stood up, and passed him with a clear distance between their bodies, which Craig did appreciate. He started to walk away, but paused. “For what it’s worth,” he said, carefully, clearly fighting off the nervous tics that were biting into his twitching hands instead, “I’m sorry it happened this way. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t-” Craig started, a hand thrown out in warning, but his shoulders fell, his spirits wilted beyond repair. “Don’t apologize. You’ll make it worse. Just… just go.”

Tweek looked at him like he was studying him, committing him to memory, but Craig wished he wouldn’t. He wished Tweek would forget about him entirely, like he could wipe the slate clean just as much as he wished he could wipe his own. This sucked no matter what angle you looked at it.

Then, without another word, Tweek turned around, and walked away.

 


End file.
